Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [169]
The venom of such attacks reflected the growing discord and apprehension among Southern Democrats. As Lincoln prepared for the election campaign, his prospects of victory had been enhanced considerably by the splintering of the Democratic Party, which was now the only party with supporters in both the North and South. Meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, before Lincoln’s nomination, the Democratic National Convention had ended in chaos. A majority of delegates, comprised of Stephen Douglas’s supporters, had presented a platform designed to paper over the slavery issue. Unfortunately for Douglas, the time when the slavery issue could be veiled had passed. Recent events, including the Dred Scott decision and the raid on Harpers Ferry by John Brown had hardened the position of many Southern leaders. The moderate positions acceptable in the past were rejected by radical Southern politicians who now condemned all compromise, demanding complete freedom to bring slaves into all the territories and explicit congressional protection for those slaves. They dismissed the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” once widely acceptable, as an abandonment of Southern principle.
When the convention approved the moderate Douglas platform, the representatives from Alabama walked out, followed first by Mississippi and then the other Southern states. As the Mississippi delegation rose to walk out, one incensed delegate climbed on a chair for a rousing farewell speech, predicting that “in less than sixty days there would be a United South.” With this, observer Murat Halstead recorded, “the South Carolinians cheered loud and long,” the applause mounting as each state bolted. That night, “there was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston…. There was no mistaking the public sentiment of the city. It was overwhelmingly and enthusiastically in favor of the seceders.”
Unable to secure a two-thirds vote for any nominee, the deadlocked Charleston convention was forced to reconvene in Baltimore after Lincoln had been nominated by the Republicans. There Douglas would finally receive the nomination he had long pursued. It was too late, however, to reassemble the pieces of the last national party. The positions of the Northern and Southern Democrats were now irreconcilable, shattered by the same forces that had destroyed the Whigs and the Know Nothings.
With Douglas the Democratic nominee, Southern seceders reconvened to nominate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a staunch believer that slavery could not constitutionally be excluded from the territories. North Carolina–born senator Joseph Lane was chosen as the vice presidential nominee. To complicate matters further, the new Constitutional Union Party, composed of old-line Whigs and remnant Know Nothings, held its own convention, nominating John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts on a platform rooted in the illusory hope that the dissolution of the Union could be avoided by ignoring the slavery question altogether.
“The great democratic organization has finally burst into pieces,” Charles Francis Adams rejoiced in a diary entry of June 23, “and the two sections have respectively nominated candidates of their own.” Two weeks later, Lincoln informed a friend that he figured “the chances were more than equal, that we could have beaten the Democracy united. Divided, as it is, it’s chance appears very slim.” Nonetheless, he cautioned, “great is Democracy in resources; and it may yet give it’s fortunes a turn.”
While the Democrats were splintering, a committee came to Springfield to notify Lincoln formally of his nomination. “Mr. Lincoln received us in the parlor of his modest frame house,” wrote Carl Schurz, Seward’s avid supporter and a leading spokesman for the German-Americans. In the “rather bare-looking room,” Lincoln “stood, tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new but ill-fitting clothes,