1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [25]
In Phillips’s denunciations there was more than a trace of the Harvard man’s disdain for an uneducated rail-splitter from backcountry. Even more, though, he and Garrison had long since lost all trust in politics itself: its tidy backroom deals, its stump speakers and ward heelers, its party platforms all bombast and no substance, and, worst of all, its endless progression of sordid compromises. They, like most other Americans, assumed that this year’s presidential race would bring simply more of the same. They had seen enough to expect nothing else.
Yet there were already signs that the 1860 election might prove them wrong. If some abolitionists believed the four nominees’ platforms simply ran the gamut from bad to worse—all of them, to one degree or another, trying to appease “the slave power”—still, a careful reader would have noticed a signal difference. The Constitutional Unionists’ platform and both the Democratic factions invoked the Constitution. The Republicans, however, quoted the famous passage of the Declaration proclaiming all men equal, endowed equally by God with certain inalienable rights. They spurned the backroom compromises of 1787 in favor of the original, radical American dream of 1776.
The Republicans had, to be sure, used the same language in their platform in 1856. This time, though, the more moderate wing had almost succeeded in taking it out until an impassioned speech at the national convention by Joshua Giddings, a party leader from Ohio, convinced the delegates to let Jefferson’s words remain. Despite all the shadowy deals struck in Chicago, the Republicans still stood for a very new—and at the same time very old—idea in mainstream American politics. The critical difference from 1856 was that now, thanks to simple electoral math, they stood a very good chance of winning the presidency.
By midsummer, the full implications of this prospect were dawning on Americans in both the North and South. In fact, Democratic newspaper editors and stump speakers, far more than any Northern Republicans, began turning the election into a national referendum on slavery, race, and equality in the very broadest sense—often in the ugliest possible terms. A St. Louis newspaper charged flatly that the principle of “negro equality” lay behind the entire Republican ideology. A Texas paper referred to Lincoln as “the candidate of the niggers.”32 And almost every anti-Lincoln paper in the country consistently referred to the “Black Republicans,” just in case any inattentive voter might somehow miss the point.
America’s rough-and-tumble young democracy had always dealt its share of bruises to those who entered the arena. But technological innovations, along with political trends, were now making the game more merciless than ever. Cheap printing and the telegraph made it easier and easier for the shrillest ideologues to find audiences, even national ones. And each fresh blast of rhetoric from the enemy demanded an even harsher volley in return. If it were cleverly enough phrased, sympathetic editors around the country might pick it up. An upstart newspaper could make its reputation that way; so could an ambitious young congressman.
The intensity of racial invective in 1860 was shocking even by the standards of that time. Northern Democrats could be as offensive as their Southern counterparts. A Chicago Democratic paper warned its readers that if Lincoln’s party won in November, the entire country would soon be overrun by “naked, greasy, bandy-shanked, blubber-lipped, monkey-headed, muskrat-scented cannibals from Congo and Guinea,” who would live on terms of perfect equality