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understood by the South as early as 1855. In that year Henry A. Wise wrote to his friend, Senator George W. Jones of Iowa:10

These isms [abolition] are not getting to be but are already treason. I would treat them as such. . . . I had rather see an earthquake swallow the mountains of the continent than to see disunion, but it will come unless these isms are repelled and suppressed as you would invasion or insurrection. Just hold up the rod in the N. West until the sun goes down and we will give 'em a Joshua defeat yet. You who are true in the non-slaveholding states are of the very truest, and you must not relax a muscle.

And in a later letter he named several prominent men in the Northwest who were true. Jefferson Davis warned his friend in Iowa in 1857.11 "We shall have work enough for you, and whilst I am there [in the Senate] I can not afford to spare you. . . . Bring your state into line and secure first your own re-election and then a good colleague." Hammond of South Carolina saw in 1858 what most other Southern leaders thought they saw:

that the most valuable part of the Mississippi valley belongs to us [the South] and, although those who have settled above us are now opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale. They are ours by the law of nature; slave labor will go over every foot of this valley where it will be found profitable to use it, and those who do not use it are soon to be united with us with such ties as will make us one and inseparable."

This was the resolute language of the leaders of the South, and the leaders of the South at that time could speak with an authority not usual in American history. Before Douglas broke with his party in 1858 all energies were bent to hold the Northwest, and there was no good reason to doubt that the coveted region would keep its place in the Democratic column. Even after Douglas defied the Buchanan administration, Wise and Alexander H. Stephens and John A. Gilmer of North Carolina continued to fight for the Northwest, for the natural alliance of the Southern up-country and the upper Mississippi states.

No one ever saw quite so clearly as Lincoln the real meaning of this contest, and none did so much to defeat it. Without Lincoln, Douglas and Squatter Sovereignty would, I think, have held those two sections together despite the extreme demands of the lower South on the one hand and the East on the other.

10 Letter of July 27, 1857, in the Iowa Historical Society. I wish here to extend my thanks to Professor B. F. Shambaugh of the University of Iowa for courtesies and assistance rendered me in my search for materials for this study. 11 Letter of May 9, 1857, in the Iowa Historical Department.

12 Speech in the United States Senate, March 4, 1858. Hammond's idea was that the railroads connecting the West and the South would so stimulate reciprocal trade between the farmers and the planters that the resistance of the ChicagoDetroit region would be overcome.

Lincoln's work from 1858 to 1860 was to defeat this Southern purpose and to widen the breach already ominous between Douglas and his quondam friends. The ground he took was that of the Declaration of Independence and he made Jefferson his patron saint. He attacked the Supreme Court as an engine of partizan and reactionary opinion, while his newspaper supporters13 declared the national judiciary to be a "subtle corps of sappers and miners of our constitutional fabric. . . nine respectable old gentlemen, slave drivers who could not maintain one set of opinions five years in succession".14 This was radicalism to match the worst that Seward had ventured even to his New York and Michigan followers. But Lincoln went even further, and declared that the nation was a house so divided against itself that it could not be expected to stand.

Douglas had enough to do to maintain himself as a progressive nationalist against such an antagonist; but the South and the administration now turned upon him. The President "read him out of the party", withdrew all governmental patronage, and sent John Slidell, the master manipulator of the party, to Chicago early in August to instruct the faithful how to "make an end" of the renegade who had dared to defy the President.15 Never in the history of American party warfare has any leader been more bitterly attacked by the head of his own house. Wise published a letter1® declaring it "a tyrannical proscription which would, alike foolishly and wickedly, lop off one of the most vigorous limbs of the national democracy, the limb of glorious Illinois".

But the Southern leaders gave up their fight to control the Northwest after the results of the campaign of 1858 became known, and planned to prevent the nomination of Douglas in 1860 or to win. another lease of power from the House of Representatives. Jefferson Davis said at Jackson, Mississippi, in 1858, that the next presidential contest would be in the House17 and this was the view of the national Democratic organ, the Washington Union. It was generally admitted from 1858 to 1860 that if the contest were carried into the House the South would win and Jefferson Davis or some other strong Southern man would be the victor.18

The great Southern senators planned to save their cause and the

13 Democratic Press and Tribune, July 29 and August 2, 1858.

14 Ibid., September 11, 1860.

15 Ibid., August 11, 1858.

16 Illinois State Register, October 12, 1858.

17 Press and Tribune, December 2, 1858, quoting the Vicksburg Whig of November 10, 1858.

18 Press and Tribune, October 3 and 4, and November 23, 1860; also testimony of Henry Adams in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, XLIII. 661.

peace of the country by "carrying the election to the House". Douglas was to Davis quite as bad as Seward, whom every politician expected to be the Republican candidate. But Douglas could hold. the Northwest against the great New Yorker and, with the electoral vote of the North divided, the candidate of the conservative or Southern Democracy would have the largest number of votes and the best chance of election in a contest in the House where the vote would be by states and where the Republicans could not hope to win a majority.19 Douglas Democrats would certainly unite with their former Southern allies rather than with their opponents at the North. The break-up of the Democratic convention at Charleston was therefore not such a radical thing as it seemed; under the existing state of things the Senate calculated reasonably upon the success of their programme. If William L. Yancey foresaw a disruption of the Union, Jefferson Davis certainly did not, except in a contingency which the great Southern leaders did not expect.

In many sections of the South the public faith in the ability of the Senate group to save the country from the Republicans was strongly manifested, and to save it by the plan I have outlined, for if the House should fail to elect, the Senate would proceed at the proper time to choose a president from the list of candidates for the vice-presidency. The New Orleans Delta declared early in July20 that the candidates before the House would "unquestionably be Breckinridge, Lincoln, and either Douglas or Bell", and the Charleston Mercury said "we incline to believe that it will end in Gen. Lane being President of the United States ".21 The more cautious Richmond Enquirer22 thought the list of candidates before the House would be Lincoln, Bell, and Breckinridge, and that probably none of these could win the necessary majority of states "and the conflict would thus be transferred to the Senate " where Hamlin and Everett would be the competitors, which Whigs ought to seek to avoid by giving up their ticket and supporting Breckinridge, to make the Democrats certain of victory, a result which all Southerners must of course prefer to the election of a New Englander. It does not seem to have occurred to the editor that the Republicans would win.. On July 26, 1860, the Enquirer said "it is demonstrable that Lincoln can not be elected, and that in case of no election in the House, Joseph Lane will be elected by the Senate". These are typical expressions of the Southern press during the summer.

19 The Republicans controlled fourteen, at most fifteen, of thirty-three delega-tions in the House.

Daily Delta, July 4, 1860.

21 Charleston Mercury, July 9, 1860.
22 Richmond Enquirer, July 13, 1860.

What the South regarded with utmost approval as a fairly certain deliverance from the democracy of Lincoln the Douglas men declared to be a Senate conspiracy to defeat the will of the people, and all the candidates but Breckinridge were urged to unite against

the dark and fatal plot concocted by James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, John C. Breckinridge and Jo. Lane to throw the decision of the next presidency into the Congress of the United States. . . . These men hold the Senate of the United States in their hands as their fief and can wield it against the North and against the conservatism of the South like a ponderous engine of mischief; and they are now exulting upon what they conceive to be the certainty of giving to the Senate the choice of the Vice President, who shall be President for four years from the fourth of March 1861.28

The Mobile Register of July 21-a Douglas paper-reports that "[it] is a conspiracy of the Democratic senators against Douglas, because he is in their way, and their object is to prevent an election by the people, knowing that the House is very little likely to agree, and in case of their failure to do so, then the whole game is in the hands of the Senate conspirators".

Another feature of this campaign, not generally noted, is that the conservative Democrats concentrated their efforts on doubtful districts in the North and consequently deprived the Republicans of a majority in the House elected at the same time that Lincoln was chosen to the presidency-a plan not infrequently resorted to now in the fierce conflicts between conservatives and liberals in both state and national elections.

While the South was thus planning to save herself first from Seward then from Lincoln, whose nomination really prevented, if one may rely upon the appearance of things at all, the success of the Senate programme, the Northwest was passing through a crisis as vital to the interests of that section as to the success of the Republican party. The policy of Lincoln in 1858 had been radical. The leaders of Illinois had taken the "bit in their teeth" in 1858 and defied Seward, Weed, Greeley, and Crittenden, all of whom favored a tacit support of Douglas and who had held a conference in Chicago prior to the senatorial campaign in Illinois and had given Douglas assurance of their support.24 Lincoln's fight had been for principle, not simply for victory, while the great men in his party had held aloof and half wished for his failure. He knew that Seward was conservative, though he spoke the language of the radical, and that the success of the party in 1860 required a decent respect for the appearance of conservatism on the part of its standard-bearer. The

23 The Washington Constitution, July 12, 1860, quoting the Philadelphia Press. 24 J. F. Newton, Lincoln and Herndon, pp. 197, 215.

Republicans of the Northwest had built up a machine, an insurgent organization, on the basis of human rights as against the rights and immunities of property.

But the election of 1858 seemed to show that the idealistic principles of the Declaration of Independence do not win majorities in this country. The gains in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa legislatures of that year were far from commensurate with the known growth of the anti-slavery counties.25 In fact the property-holding classes of the Chicago region were going over to the Douglas plan of settling the slavery problem. And in 1859, in Iowa, with a population of over 600,000, the Republican candidate for governor, Kirkwood, after a most sensational and demagogical campaign, was able to poll but a meagre majority of 2500-a majority no larger than that of Grimes in 1854 when the population was not half as great.20 It was plain to all that the conservative forces were holding their own and attracting many of the new-comers. Then came the John Brown raid, which appeared at once as a Republican move or the logical result of the teachings of the party. Many men of the Northwest, like Cyrus H. McCormick, pointed to this as the natural outcome of the house-divided-against-itself doctrine. Indeed the chances of the young Republican party to win in 1860 were decreasing, especially in these strategic states.

The great churches of the Northwest were becoming aroused to the dangers of radicalism. The Catholics made no denial that they were on the conservative side; one of the party cries of 1860 was that Douglas had bowed the knee to the Pope in Rome on his recent visit to Europe. The Episcopalian organ, the Chicago Record, acknowledged in December, 1860, that the bishops and clergy of that denomination had never raised their voices against the South or slavery. But a much more effective influence among the staid property-holding people was that of the Presbyterians. This denomination was especially strong with the old families and its membership for this region in 1860 approached 150,000.28 Between 1854 and 1858 a strong movement in favor of positive action in the synods against slavery had grown up. Dr. E. M. McMaster was the recognized spokesman of this sentiment. In 1857 he and his friends pro

27

23 The Indiana legislature of 1858 was composed of 75 Republicans and 75 Democrats; in Illinois the Democratic majority in the legislature was 8; while in Iowa the parties stood 63 Republican to 45 Democrat. Cf. Tribune Almanac, 1858. 26 Louis Pelzer, Life of A. C. Dodge, pp. 243, 246-247.

Chicago Record, December 15, 1860.

28 Census of 1860, Statistics of the United States, miscellaneous volume, pp. 371-392. The actual membership cannot be ascertained, but the figure given seems to be a fair estimate from data given in the census returns.

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