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

president-elect, tried to offer as much in the way of reassurance as he could to the South without violating his own principles or the platform of the Republican Party. Late in November Lincoln wrote that, as president, he would regard himself as bound to obey the Constitution and the laws, including the fugitive slave laws and the security of slavery in the slave states. “I have labored in, and for, the Republican organization with entire confidence that whenever it shall be in power, each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively… as they have ever been under any administration,” Lincoln wrote calmly from Springfield two weeks after the election. “I regard it as extremely fortunate for the peace of the whole country, that this point… is now to be brought to a practical test, and placed beyond the possibility of Doubt.” To his old Whig comrade in politics, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, Lincoln wrote on December 22 to reiterate that he had no intention of meddling with slavery in the States, where the Constitution gave him no authority to meddle with it. “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves?” Lincoln asked soothingly. “If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.”71

This gave little quiet to Southern jitters because, as president, Lincoln had no authority to interfere with slavery anyway; slavery was a matter of state statutes and state enactments, and while the Constitution obliquely recognized slavery’s existence, it gave it no explicit guarantees, either. Lincoln was, in effect, promising not to do what he had no power to do anyway. At the same time, Lincoln made it plain that he would never countenance the extension of slavery into the territories. Territorial governments, which Lincoln insisted fell under the jurisdiction of Congress no matter what the dictum of Roger Taney, were hereby served notice that applications for statehood that legalized slavery would get no backing from him and no appointees who would oil slavery’s wheels. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote on December 10. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.” He was certainly not about to retreat to some form of the popular sovereignty doctrine in the territories in order to pacify Southern threats of disunion. “I am sorry any Republican inclines to dally with Pop. Sov. of any sort,” Lincoln wrote to the Indiana Republican chairman on December 18. “It acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for.”72 Beyond his promise to leave slavery alone in the slave states, Lincoln would make no further concessions.

This could have been read as Lincoln’s admission that direct intervention in the slave states was out of the question, a hint he hoped Alexander Stephens and other Southerners would take to their comfort. But such an admission, however significant in Republican eyes and disappointing to the abolitionists, fell considerably short of the reassurances about a slave code and a reopened slave trade that the South was now demanding in what amounted to the final round in the forty-year-long game of balances. Exclusion of slavery from the territories meant that slave-based agriculture had no future, and since the states that would one day be formed in the territories would now be free states, then no matter what Lincoln’s assurances for the present about slavery and the Constitution, the mounting number of free states in the Union would eventually permit the Republicans to create and adopt amendments to the Constitution for abolishing slavery outright, and get them ratified by an ever-increasing free-state majority.

This, at least, was the logic of the calmest slaveholders. Other Southerners, convinced that the spirit of John Brown was now about to take up residence in the White House, reached for the weapon they had so often threatened to use: unilateral secession from the Union. Within twenty-three days of Lincoln’s election, five Southern states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida—had authorized the calling of state conventions to debate withdrawal from the Union, and Louisiana’s legislature was in special session in order to call such a convention. In Texas, only the stubborn opposition of Governor Sam Houston kept the legislature from calling for a secession convention, and not even Houston would be able to stave off that demand forever. Even before his state convention met, Alabama’s Governor Moore mobilized the state militia, then pressured Alabama banks into suspending payments of hard cash (mostly owed to Northern banks) and made them guarantee at least $1 million in their vaults for the use of the state. Georgia governor Joseph Brown asked the Georgia legislature for $1 million to purchase weapons for the state and ordered the Georgia militia to occupy Fort Pulaski, a federal fort at the entrance to the port of Savannah.73

Leading all of the Southern states in secession fervor was South Carolina, whose grievances with the Union ran all the way back to the Nullification Crisis of 1832. Moreover, South Carolina was home to some of the most radical and eloquent voices for disunion, and they made themselves heard when the South Carolina secession convention assembled on December 17, 1860, in Columbia. After deliberating for two days, the entire convention shifted to Charleston and there, at 1:15 pm on December 20, the South Carolina convention unanimously passed a secession ordinance and declared that South Carolina had resumed its status as an independent republic.

In a document drafted by one of the most passionate of the South Carolina disunionists, Robert Barnwell Rhett, the convention rejected any notions that it was perpetrating a treasonous revolution. Instead, it asserted the provisional nature of the Union and insisted that it was simply taking back, by means of a convention,