1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [26]
Bennett’s fellow New Yorkers, in fact, seemed especially virulent in their racism. Democrats paraded through the streets of Manhattan with banners reading “No Negro Equality.” One showed a crudely caricatured black man embracing a white girl. Another banner bore a cartoon of an African-American above the words “The successor of Abraham Lincoln in 1864.”34 (Interestingly, the specter of a future black president cropped up repeatedly throughout the campaign as an anti-Republican scare tactic. “What will you do with these people?” one pro-Bell orator asked rhetorically. “Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your states, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be President of the United States?”)35
Many Democratic newspapers warned of possible horrors even worse than a Negro in the White House. “There can be no reasonable doubt that the direct result of Black Republicanism … is to ferment servile insurrections in the South, and provoke such horrible atrocities as marked the negro insurrection in St. Domingo and Hayti,” one editor wrote. The implication was clear: loyalty to the Union demanded loyalty, first and foremost, to the white race.36
Only by standing faithfully at the side of their slaveholding white brethren, many Northerners believed, could they preserve the nation intact. At a rally in the Cooper Union—the same hall where Lincoln had delivered his great speech on slavery and the Constitution a few months earlier—a crowd of several thousand Democrats sang in unison:
We fight to save the Union, and God is on our side;
We fight against a faction who would let the Union slide;
To put down these rail-splitters, who would split it into two,
They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue.
As the Democrats’ drumbeats grew louder, though, so did some Republicans’. Boston’s own Charles Sumner—the abolitionist martyr beaten almost to death on the floor of the Senate after one of his tirades against slavery—descended from the Olympian heights of Beacon Hill to stump for Lincoln just after Independence Day. “Prostrate the slave oligarchy,” the Massachusetts senator commanded a large gathering of the party faithful:
Prostrate the slave oligarchy and the North shall no longer be the vassal of the South.… Its final doom may be postponed, but it is certain. Languishing, it may live yet longer; but it will surely die. Yes, fellow-citizens, surely it will die.… It can no longer rule the republic as a plantation … can no longer fasten upon the Constitution an interpretation that makes merchandise of men, and gives a disgraceful immunity to the brokers of human flesh and the butchers of human hearts.… It must die, it may be, as a poisoned rat dies of rage in its hole.
For some Americans who would read the speech in the days to come, another of Sumner’s exhortations may have been even more alarming: “If bad men conspire for slavery, good men must combine for freedom. Nor can the holy war be ended until the barbarism now dominant in the republic is overthrown, and the Pagan power is driven from our Jerusalem.”37
As for the Republican candidate himself, he sat silent as ever in Springfield. The party’s moderate leaders fanned out across New York and Pennsylvania, talking busily about tariffs, about railroads—about anything except slavery. In Boston, Garrison and Phillips poured forth their crystalline stream of prophecy, as ever untainted by the muck of politics. But across the North, almost imperceptibly at first, a grassroots army was banding together: one that would enter