A Disease in the Public Mind (39 page)

Both Howe and Gridley swore to tell the truth, and then lied steadily about their relationship with John Brown. Stearns solemnly assured the senators, “I never supposed he contemplated anything like what occurred at Harpers Ferry.” Having it both ways, Stearns added, “I should have disapproved of it [Brown's raid] if I had known of it. But I have since changed my opinion.”
³¹

Why did Chairman Mason let these men get away with perjury? Probably for the same reason that he did not summon the defiant Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The atmosphere in Congress and in Washington, DC, was already so tense that the committee feared an outbreak of violence. Almost every member of both houses of Congress was carrying a gun. In the crowded galleries, there were undoubtedly more weapons. John Brown's fanaticism seemed to be in charge, North and South.

CHAPTER 21

An Ex-President Tries to Save the Union

Six months after John Brown's execution, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republican Party. Brown was indirectly responsible for disposing of his chief opponent, Senator William Seward. The senator had been in Europe when Brown seized Harpers Ferry. On Seward's return to America, he was dismayed to find voters blaming him for the reckless foray.

The
New York Herald
's attack on Seward on the day the Harpers Ferry story broke convinced Democrats they could drive Seward out of politics. He was up for reelection in the Senate as well as running for president. The Democrats followed up the
Herald
's blast with a pamphlet,
The Rise and Progress of the Bloody Outbreak at Harpers Ferry
, which accused Seward and Republicans in general of creating—and in some cases justifying—Brown.

Southern newspapers, almost all Democratic, quickly took up the cry, pointing as evidence to the way so many Republican editors and politicians were frantically backing away from Brown. The
Herald
continued its assault, claiming that a Brown accomplice had visited Seward in 1858 and told him exactly what Brown planned to do at Harpers Ferry. Seward vehemently
denied any connection to Brown and called Harpers Ferry an act of rebellion and treason. He even said Brown's execution was “necessary and just.” Trapped by his need to retain his abolitionist supporters, Seward also called Brown's fate “pitiable.” These statements did not do him much good with northern voters who dreaded a civil war. Lincoln, on the other hand, had made several statements deploring abolitionists and their tactics. With no taint of radicalism about him, he easily won the nomination in Chicago.
¹

•      •      •

The drama in the nominating stage of the 1860 election was all on the Democratic side. Their success in linking Republicans with John Brown made it a near certainty that the new party would win no votes in the South and would lose quite a few in the North. This meant that the Democrats were the nation's only hope of electing a president who could hold the two seething sections of the nation together.

Their convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, 1860. In the aura of the John Brown–stirred hysteria gripping the nation, sensible men should have urged another site. The city and the state were still the headquarters for secessionist thinking, even though their patron saint, John Calhoun, had been dead for almost ten years. Everyone knew the leading candidate, Stephen Douglas, was still locked in a ferocious feud with President James Buchanan over Kansas. Maneuvering in the background was Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who had a convoluted scheme to make a proslavery man president.

In the foreground stood the chairman of the convention, balding Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, as oily—and brilliant—a character as ever slithered through American politics. His chief claim to fame (or better, power) was engineering the presidential nomination of fellow New Englander Franklin Pierce for president in 1852. Ostensibly, Cushing went to Charleston in search of a compromise. But he was already on record as believing that the separation of North and South was inevitable.

Cushing did nothing to block or dissuade Jefferson Davis, who demanded a “black code” for the federal government that would legalize slavery in all
the territories. The chairman may have been covertly involved in Davis's plan to break up the convention and create a third party, which would produce a winner without an electoral vote majority. That event would throw the final decision into Congress in a repetition of 1824, which had enabled John Quincy Adams to become president. Davis was hoping to wangle Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, a pro-Southerner like Buchanan, into the White House.

Other Southerners trumped Davis with a demand that the party's plank include a declaration that slavery was “right.” When Stephen Douglas and his mostly northern backers demurred, fifty-one delegates from the eight cotton states walked out. In 1948, hard-core segregationists would take a similar walk; the party's leaders simply declared them ex-Democrats and resumed the convention without them, nominating President Harry S Truman for another term. Cushing refused to rule that the walkouts had left the party. To win the nomination, Douglas would still have to win two thirds of the total number of delegates, rather than two-thirds of the delegates who remained.

After dozens of ballots, Douglas was still far short of the necessary figure. The infuriated northern Democrats—a clear majority—abandoned Charleston for Baltimore, where they reconvened. The cotton-state delegates followed them, triggering a wild battle about who should and who would not be seated. This led to another walkout—this time by 110 southern delegates. Douglas's backers then named him the party's “official” nominee.
²

The Democracy, as Andrew Jackson had called it, was no longer a party. It was a mélange of anger and ideology cartwheeling toward dissolution. The southern delegates convened a rump convention over which Cushing, showing his convictions (or lack of them), presided. They nominated Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge for president and Senator Lane for vice president. Breckinridge was already vice president under Buchanan. Their platform was proslavery in every imaginable respect. It now seems likely that secessionists, with the help of the pliable Cushing, were in control of this breakaway group from the start.
³

Despairing moderates from the North and South nominated a third ticket, whose platform consisted of little more than a call to obey the Constitution. They named former Whig Senator John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts as their candidates. Everett was a famous orator and former governor and senator, who often attacked abolitionists as a menace to the Union.

The election was vigorously conducted, with parades and bonfires and speeches. The Bell-Everett parades featured a huge bell, which was clanged to warn people that the Union was in mortal danger. Douglas was the only candidate who campaigned in the South as well as the North, exhausting himself with day after day of speeches in his roaring over-the-top style.
⁴

On November 6, Abraham Lincoln won the election with a clear majority in the electoral college. He carried every northern state except New Jersey, but he got only a handful of votes in the South, probably from nostalgic ex-Whigs. His three opponents polled almost a million more votes, a clear signal that the Republicans were by no means a majority party. The Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. Lincoln would have to work with them to implement any policy. But in the South, where John Brown had reignited Thomas Jefferson's nightmare of a race war, the Republican victory only deepened the panic.
⁵

•      •      •

In Port Gibson, Mississippi, two days after Lincoln's election, an orator declared that a “black Republican” president meant that the South was on its way to “the bloody scenes on St. Domingo, the destruction of the white race, and the relapsing into barbarism of the black race.” He was joined by a chorus of speakers and writers in other states. In New Orleans, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church predicted a repetition of the horrors that “converted St. Domingo into a howling waste.” The sermon was published and sold 100,000 copies. An editorial in the Montgomery, Alabama,
Advertiser
declared that government by abolitionists could have only one horrific outcome: “Look at St. Domingo.”
⁶

In South Carolina, huge rallies led by marching bands and thousands of men waving palmetto leaves called for secession from a government run by
the “bigoted blackguards of the New England states.” Andrew Pickens Calhoun, son of the famous senator, predicted that Lincoln's antislavery rhetoric would invite a repetition of Santo Domingo. On December 20, 1860, little more than six weeks after Lincoln's election, a Charleston convention voted to secede, 169 to 0. In another forty days, state after state from the Deep South joined the procession—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
⁷

In some states, such as Alabama and Georgia, the decision was far from unanimous. But there was little doubt that a majority of the voters backed secession. The only state to put the decision to a ballot was Texas, where secession won by 3 to 1. Senator Judah Benjamin of Louisiana, one of the first Jewish-Americans to win high office, described the Deep South's mood as a “wild torrent of passion . . . a revolution of the most intense character.”
⁸

Joy was the prevailing emotion in celebrations after the conventions voted. No one seemed to worry about a war. There was an almost universal opinion that the Yankees were cowards who would flee at the first glimpse of a southern bayonet. If any bloodshed occurred, it would not be enough to fill “a lady's thimble,” according to one South Carolinian. On February 8, delegates from the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, and declared that they were the Confederate States of America. The following day they elected Jefferson Davis as their president. Next came a constitution, which provided no federal supreme court and declared that their congress could never pass a law “denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves.”
⁹

•      •      •

In Texas, Colonel Robert E. Lee was stunned and dismayed by the swiftness of the Union's collapse. He was even more dismayed when friends began resigning from the U.S. Army to join the army of the new confederacy. Kentuckian Albert Sidney Johnson, another West Pointer who had won distinction in the Mexican War, had been in command in distant San Francisco. He had tried to stay neutral, but someone in the Buchanan administration abruptly removed him. It may have been a Democrat who wanted him to join the new confederacy. Virginian Joseph Johnston, a West Point
classmate and close friend of Lee, struggled to stay neutral as chaos swirled around him in Washington, DC, where he was serving as the army's quartermaster general.
¹⁰

Lee still hoped that the politicians could find a formula to lure the seceded states back into the Union. He deplored the extremists on both sides and trusted there was “wisdom and patriotism enough” somewhere to rescue the situation. “I cannot anticipate so great a calamity to the nation as the dissolution of the Union,” he told a niece in one of his many letters. At the same time he admitted he sympathized with his fellow Southerners. He resented “the aggressions of the North, their denial of equal rights of our citizens to the common territories of the commonwealth.”

Lee approved President Buchanan's December message to Congress, in which he blamed the looming disaster on a disease in the public mind and urged the legislators to pass an “explanatory amendment” to the Constitution, affirming the right of property in slaves and an obligation to protect this right in the territories. “The propositions of the president are eminently right and just,” Lee told his oldest son, Custis. The lame-duck president's message was as totally ignored as the departing tirade of his Democratic predecessor, Franklin Pierce.
¹¹

Colonel Lee's temper visibly rose when some cotton-state politicians uttered threats against Virginia and other border states because they had not joined the march to secession. Even more disturbing was the discovery that several politicians from these seceded states wanted to know why Lee had not resigned his commission and joined the Confederate army. He exploded into uncharacteristic rage that left his fellow soldiers stunned and amazed. They were even more amazed by Lee's reaction when they heard the news that Texas had seceded. “I shall never forget [Lee's] look of astonishment . . . his lips trembled and his eyes [were] full of tears,” one friend later recalled.
¹²

During these weeks, the colonel read Edward Everett's
The Life of George Washington
, a somewhat sketchy but admiring portrait. “How his spirit would be grieved to see the wreck of his mighty labors,” Lee wrote in another letter. He refused to believe that his contemporaries would “destroy the work of [Washington's] noble deeds.” Personally, he was ready to
sacrifice “everything but honor” to save the Union. He had no doubt whatsoever that secession was treason. The Constitution had declared the union “perpetual” in its preamble.

Over the crackling telegraph came news that stirred hope. Virginia had gone to the polls and elected a convention to consider secession. By a two to one margin, they had chosen delegates opposed to rupturing the Union. On February 4, 1861, came a new surprise. Colonel Lee was relieved of command of the Second Cavalry and ordered to report to Washington, DC, by March 1. As Lee departed, one of his younger officers asked, “Colonel, do you intend to go South or remain North?”