• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1841 0

from the Caribbean (where renegade Southern adventurers had recently tried to take Cuba and Nicaragua by force) to the Pacific coast. How else to understand their violations of the Missouri Compromise and attempts to expand slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, far north of the bounds Congress had set? Northerners had been forced to swallow the Fugitive Slave Act, making local courts complicit in the kidnapping of Negroes living peacefully among their white neighbors. They had seen antislavery settlers massacred in Missouri and Kansas, and, throughout the South, anyone expressing even the mildest antislavery sentiments had suffered imprisonment, flogging, tarring and feathering, and sometimes death. This violence had reached even the sacred halls of the Capitol when Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, brutally beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor. Slaveholders and their allies burned books, banned newspapers, and terrorized ministers of the gospel. They had, in fact, made a mockery of the entire idea of American democracy, turning the phrase “land of the free” into a sneer on European lips. And all this was over and above the crimes and outrages that Southerners perpetrated every day against four million helpless men, women, and children whom they kept in bondage, sold like cattle, and exploited for their sexual pleasure.

As with all politics, there was also a broad middle ground on which most white American males—which is also to say most voters—probably stood. Some Southerners, especially in states of the Upper South like Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Virginia, saw slavery as an unfortunate arrangement and hoped it could gradually be done away with, perhaps by sending freed blacks to Liberia and compensating their owners, whose slaves often constituted most of their wealth. A larger share of Northerners, while wishing to limit the spread of slavery, felt it would be dangerous, as well as unfair to slaveholders, to impose a program of emancipation. They certainly did not identify themselves as abolitionists, a term reserved for members of a radical, crankish New England sect. Indeed, the vast majority of white Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line accepted without question the premise that blacks were inherently inferior and that the two races could never live together as equals. Some white Northerners even agreed with the common Southern sentiment that slavery was good for the Negro.

Each of the three major parties in the 1860 presidential election sought to capture as much of this middle ground as possible, promising some form of compromise that would keep the peace. Wasn’t this, after all, the very essence of American democracy: balancing interests, reconciling contrary views, and protecting each community’s right to make its own laws and follow its own conscience? Few were those, either abolitionists or slaveholders, who didn’t maintain that even an uncomfortable truce was preferable to the horrors of civil war.

Some Northern and Southern moderates had banded together in February to form a new national party based on the simplest version of this logic. The platform of the Constitutional Union Party was little more than a slogan: “The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” It nominated Bell, a Tennessee slaveholder who believed the Constitution protected the right to own slaves but opposed recent Southern expansionism, especially the effort to foist slavery upon Kansas. Bell was a colorless, even dour man with a hangdog face that seemed drawn into a permanent frown—indeed, he made ex-presidents like Tyler and Fillmore look dashing by comparison—but perhaps stolid, uncharismatic conservatism was just what the overexcited nation needed.

The Democrats fielded not one but two candidates in 1860. In June, the party had split into regional factions, one of them dominated by Southerners and the other by Northerners.20 The Southern wing nominated Buchanan’s vice president, a handsome, courtly thirty-nine-year-old Kentuckian named