Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [180]
Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election. “The cardinal error of the Republicans,” Nevins writes, was their failure to deal candidly with “the now imminent danger of secession.” Their dismissal of the looming possibility of secession was in part, but only in part, a deliberate tactic to ignore the threat so that voters would not be scared away from the Republican ticket. Beyond that, they simply did not believe that the threat was serious. After all, the South had made similar threats intermittently for the past forty years. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later admitted, “we all dwelt in a fool’s Paradise.” Though Northern Republicans had undoubtedly seen the threatening editorials in Southern newspapers, they continued to believe, as Lincoln told a journalist friend, that the movement was simply “a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North.”
In mid-August, Lincoln assured one of his supporters, John Fry, that “people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.” Many in the South were equally skeptical. A Tennessee editor later admitted that “the cry of disunion had been raised so often that few had taken it seriously during the campaign. Evidently the ‘Northern sectionalists’ had believed it to be ‘all talk’…while most intelligent Southerners had assumed that it was ‘an idle menace, made to sway Northern sentiment.’”
Bates likewise shrugged off Southern threats as the desperation of belligerent politicians, while Seward openly scorned the taunts of secession: “they cry out that they will tear the Union to pieces…‘Who’s afraid?’ Nobody’s afraid.” His audience echoed: “Nobody!” Among Lincoln’s colleagues, only Frank Blair, Jr., recognized that the distortions of Lincoln’s speeches in the Southern papers and the “misrepresentations” of extremists who intimated the Republicans intended an attack on the South had created “a large and influential class who are even now ready to apply the torch which will light the fires of civil discord.” Still, Blair believed, these extremists would not succeed and “this glorious Union” would not “be sundered in consequence of the triumph of our party.” Even John Breckinridge, the South’s standard-bearer, sought to distance himself from Southern extremists. His sole campaign speech refuted charges that he favored splitting up the Union.
The realization that the “irrepressible conflict” might prove more than rhetoric came too late. The divided house would indeed fall. These phrases, intended by Seward and Lincoln as historical prophecies, were perceived by many in the South as threats—imminent and meant to be answered.
With the October elections, the campaign had gained decisive momentum, but it was not yet over. With four candidates dividing the vote, Lincoln would have to capture New York’s pivotal 35 electoral votes to win an electoral majority and avoid throwing the election into the House. He relied on Thurlow Weed to manage the campaign in New York, but continued to seek other perspectives and intelligence. “I have a good deal of news from New-York,” Lincoln told former congressman John Pettit, “but, of course, it is from friends, and is one-sided…. It would seem that assurances to this point could not be better than I have. And yet it may be delusive.”
The Empire State posed unique problems for Republicans. New York was home to large numbers of traditionally Democratic Irish immigrants who were unfriendly to the antislavery cause. In addition, New York City contained an influential class of merchants and manufacturers who viewed Republicanism as a threat to their commercial relations with the South. If these groups united against Lincoln, and if, as the Douglas people believed, Seward’s partisans remained unreconciled to Lincoln’s nomination,