Why Lincoln?

History books often state that, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the South seceded from the Union. They rarely give any reason for this action, other than Lincoln opposed expanding slavery into the western territories. Why Lincoln? What was so important or earth-shattering about his election? Would the South have seceded if another Republican candidate had been elected? What about a Northern Democrat? Just what prompted this course of action may reveal the true cause of the Civil War.

As the presidential election year of 1860 opened, two men expected to lead their respective parties in the campaign; William H. Seward for the Republicans and Stephen A. Douglas for the Democrats. Both men faced strong opposition from within their parties. Many believed that Seward had secretly supported John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. Also, the Republicans had learned, in the 1856 elections, how important carrying Pennsylvania and Indiana would be in the upcoming election. Many believed Seward incapable of carrying those states.

The Democratic party, by 1860, had become divided between Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats over the issue of popular sovereignty and slavery expansion in the western territories. Douglas had opposed the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution in Kansas and this made him unacceptable to Southern Democrats. Further, many Southern political leaders could see no difference in position between Seward and Douglas on the slavery issue.

Actually, slavery itself was not the issue; it was the manifestation of the issue. What was at issue in 1860 was the social and economic future of the Union. The debate over the course of the country, its manifest destiny, had been waging since 1815. Since the end of the war with Mexico, it had been building to a climax.

In the North, industrialization and development went hand in hand with immigration. The expansion into the Northwest Territories, Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region revolved as much around new industries as it did around increased agricultural production. With this expansion grew a new image of an American. He was an independent entrepreneur, the equal of any other white male and superior to all other races. He believed in free soil and free labor and honest coinage. All he asked was to be allowed to continue to develop without let or hindrance.

The situation in the South was vastly different. Saddled with a slave based plantation economy older than the Union, the southern slaveholders wielded a great deal of political and social power. For them, unrestricted industrial development and immigration was a direct attack on their way of life. Negro slavery was both the foundation of their economic power and the support of their class distinction. As the Union expanded, the South, faced with depleted soil conditions and lower crop yields, recognized the need to expand their institutions into the western lands. But such expansion ran head-on into the free soil - free labor ideals of the North.

It was in the new territories, which would soon become new states with full representative powers in the Congress, that the difference between these two ideologies came into conflict. If the South was to continue to wield the political power in Congress that it had grown accustomed to, it would need the additional congressmen the new western states would provide to counter the North's additional congressmen received from the increase in population due to immigration. To ensure that, the South had to export slavery into the territories. Exclusion of slavery from the territories meant the North would receive that Congressional representation, also, and vastly increased political power.

The struggle began in 1819 with Congressman James Tallmadge (N.Y.). He proposed an amendment to the Missouri Statehood Bill that prohibited increasing slavery in Missouri and granted freedom to all slave children in Missouri at age 25. It passed the House but failed in the Senate. The Bill, without the Tallmadge amendment, passed the Senate but not the House. At the same time, the Arkansas Territory was organized as a slave-holding territory despite concentrated efforts to prevent it. In 1820, a bill to admit Maine as a state was introduced. Senator Rufus King of New York introduced the argument that Congress could keep slavery out of Missouri (and, by extension, out of all territories) under its power to regulate territories. When a bill was introduced to consider Maine and Missouri for statehood at the same time, a joint committee was formed, headed by Speaker of the House Henry Clay. The resulting compromise admitted Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state and prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude.

The situation may have stabilized itself at this point if not for two unrelated events. The first was the Indian Removal Act and the creation of an Indian Territory out of part of Arkansas. While this opened new land in the South to plantation expansion, it restricted additional expansion west. The second was the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War and the resolution of the Oregon question. The Union had expanded by at least a third and the question of whether the 36-30 line extended to the Pacific exploded in Congress.

In 1850 those giant Congressional leaders, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, were joined by William H. Seward, Stephen A. Douglas and Jefferson Davis in the Great Debate over the newly acquired western lands. After long and bitter debate, which saw the death of Calhoun and the ruination of Webster, Douglas maneuvered the Compromise of 1850 through Congress. The most important result of this Compromise was the establishment of the principle of popular sovereignty to the new territories; that is, each territory could, by popular vote, decide for itself whether to be slave or free. This principle was to become the backbone of Douglas' political ideology.

Again, the situation could have stabilized here. But many Southern slaveholders and plantation owners were beginning to question how well their interests were being represented by Douglas. The answer came on January 23, 1854. Douglas introduced a bill to organize Kansas and Nebraska as territories, reserving the issue of slavery to a popular vote, and repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Douglas walked a narrow line with this bill. While it offered the South the opportunity to expand slavery north of the 36-30 latitude, it did so without providing the South with any assurance of support by Douglas. The unforeseen result of the Act was the collapse of the existing political parties.

Whigs and Democrats opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act combined and organized a new political party, the Republican Party. The Democratic party split into Northern and Southern arms, each augmented by those Whigs who did not join the Republican cause. In the spring elections, Democrats suffered great losses.

For the next two years, 1854-56, the struggle focused on Kansas. Both pro- and anti-slavery forces encouraged supporters to migrate to Kansas. In the first election, over 1700 Missourians crossed over into Kansas and voted in a proslavery delegation to Congress. Four months later, in March, 1855, Missourians again crossed and voted a proslavery legislature into office. In 1856, the election was overturned and a freesoil legislature was elected. After a year of bitter and sometimes bloody conflict, a constitutional convention was convened at Lecompton, Kansas and a proslavery constitution was adopted for the Kansas territory. Douglas refused to support this constitution.

The presidential election of 1856 reflected the change in the political scene as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The newly created Republican Party nominated John C. Fremont. The Democrats nominated James Buchanan, felt to be best qualified to unite the Northern and Southern wings. The American (Know Nothing) Party returned Millard Fillmore to national attention by nominating him. Buchanan easily defeated his two opponents. The voting was noticeably along sectional lines. Fremont's vote was confined, generally, to the northern states and Republican leaders noted that Fremont's failure to carry Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois cost him the election. The South, despite their victory in Buchanan, viewed the election results with alarm. For the first time in history, a candidate, Fremont, received a plurality of the popular vote in the free states while receiving barely one-tenth of one percent of the popular vote in the slave states. Republican campaign rhetoric in 1856 had called slavery a relic of barbarism and had pledged to eliminate it from all Federal territories. The South had threatened to succeed from the Union if Fremont was elected. With Buchanan's victory, the South saw such threat as a viable and effective campaign tool; one to be used again.

The Republican party, in assessing the 1856 election results, found they had to expand beyond the sectionalism they had achieved. In order to be truly effective, they had to become a true national party. To do so, the Republicans began to appeal to Unionist sympathy among non-slaveholding Southerners. They argued that Southern slavery retarded, in the South, progress that the North was enjoying. Slavery degraded the status of free labor while driving down white workers' wages. Republicans argued that inefficient slave labor interfered with economy growth and development. They accused the plantation owners of discouraging industrial entrepreneurial attempts. The common man, they said, had no chance to advance and improve himself under such a system. The expansion of slavery had to be stopped and the system itself gradually eliminated.

Such statements sent shock waves through out the South.

Southern planters felt themselves under attack. The very fabric of their carefully constructed social environment threatened to rip. They were the highest of upper classes; the Negro slaves the lowest of untouchables. How could any white man, they wondered, much less a Republican, advocate the Negro be set free? How could a Negro be the equal of a plantation owner; free to attend the same schools, free to marry a white woman, free to compete for jobs with white men? Were the Northern Republicans serious? As the Southern planters looked North for answers, they found what they believed was a conspiracy to destroy the South.

That the North had stringent restrictions on free Negroes was what the Southerners found. Illinois, in 1848, had voted to exclude free Negroes from immigrating into the state. Other states and territories had similar restrictions, as well as banning miscegena tion, segregating schools, and regulating wages. The North didn't even consider free Negroes as fully equal to whites. In his first debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln argued that Negroes should be entitled to the same rights granted by the Declaration of Independence that Americans enjoyed. But he limited those rights to "the right to eat the bread...which his own hand earns...," via free labor. Lincoln admitted he did not favor full political and social equality for and with the Negro. If this was how the North really felt, the Southern planters asked themselves, what other reason can there be for Republican abolitionist movements than to destroy the South and its social, political and economic way of life? The call for secession as the only way to preserve that lifestyle grew louder.

In April, 1860, the Democratic Party gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, for its national convention. Stephen A. Douglas was supremely confident that his name would head the Democratic ticket in the November election. However, nearly a year earlier, in June, 1859, he had stated that he would only accept the nomination if the party endorsed his position on popular sovereignty in the territories. Never would he accept a platform which included reviving the African slave trade nor would he advocate a Congressional slave code for the territories such as the Davis resolutions.

To insure Douglas would have the platform he wanted, his delegation, lead by William A. Richardson, pushed for the nomination before drafting the party's platform. But the Southern delegates, not trusting in Douglas, pushed for the platform's drafting before the nomination. William Lowndes Yancey, leader of the Alabama delegation, insisted the South stand together. If Douglas was nominated, without a pledge to support his Alabama platform, he would lead the Southern delegates out of the convention. The second day of the convention, the fatal decision was made to adopt a platform first.

The platform committee was unable to agree on the Democratic policy. Three platforms were submitted to the convention. The majority report submitted the same Cincinnati platform Douglas had ran on in 1856 but with certain changes designed to place it unequivocally in support of slavery in the territories. A minority report, favored by Douglas' men, also reaffirmed the Cincinnati platform but reserved to the judiciary all questions of the rights of property (which by definition included slaves) in the territories. The third proposal simply adopted the Cincinnati platform without any changes.

Yancey, seeing his chance, rose and denounced Douglas to the convention. In an impassioned ninety minute speech, he enumerated all the reasons the South could no longer trust Douglas; his repudiation of the Compromise of 1850 in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, his failure to support the Lecompton struggle, his trust in the Supreme Court and the Dred Scott decision, his opposition to the Davis slave code resolutions. Yancey called for new guarantees of Southern rights.

The platform committee attempted to resolve the conflict but again was unable to reach a consensus of opinion. On Monday, April 30, the convention voted on the majority and minority proposals. The majority platform, the unchanged Cincinnati program, was quickly rejected. The minority proposal, favored by Douglas' delegates, was voted on section by section. The first section reaffirmed the Cincinnati platform. The second section pledged the party to abide by decisions of the Supreme Court on questions of slavery in the territories. The delegates from seven Southern states refused to vote on this section or any of the remaining sections. Charles E. Stuart, a Douglas delegate from Michigan, angry over the South's rejection of Douglas' conciliatory efforts, concluded the session with an inflammatory speech against the Southern delegates. At its conclusion, the Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Arkansas delegates walked out. Georgia joined them the next day. The convention, unable to name a candidate, adjourned, to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18th. The solidarity of the Democratic party had been broken and the last national political party shattered.

Events moved quickly. Whigs and American (Know-Nothing) Party members merged into the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell for president. In Baltimore, Northern Democrats nominated Douglas while Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge. The Republican party, long expected to nominate William H. Seward, was skillfully maneuvered into nominating Lincoln.

Lincoln was pledged to support the Republican Party Platform. The platform rejected the concept that the Constitution permitted slavery automatically in the territories in favor of the view that the territories were naturally free and no legislation could impose slavery in them. It rejected the re-opening of the African slave trade and called for its suppression. It did not call for the abolition of slavery but, unofficially, the Party had long acknowledged that slavery must eventually die out.

Lincoln's reputation for honesty was not only one of the factors in his nomination, it was a major factor in his election. The South knew he would strive with all his might to implement the Republican platform. Three weeks after Lincoln's election, five southern states had arranged conventions to vote on secession.

There is no question that, had Breckinridge won, the South would have remained in the Union and there would have been no Civil War. But pressure from Republicans and Northern Democrats would have caused continuous battles in Congress over slavery. John Bell, being a strict Constitutionalist, would have been acceptable to the South; they would have felt they could negotiate with him. Had Douglas won, the South would have also attempted to dissolve the Union. Had Seward been the Republican candidate instead of Lincoln, there is serious doubt whether he would have carried such strongholds of the Know- Nothings as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Those states would likely have gone to Douglas.

Even with Lincoln's election, there was a chance to avoid succession and war. In December, 1860, several proposals were submitted in Congress to give assurances to the South. The most important was Senator John J. Crittenden's amendment to extend the 36-30 line, banning slavery north of the line but guaranteeing it below the line. Another proposed amendment was to guarantee slavery in the states. All such compromises were rejected by the Republicans who, because they were committed to an anti-slavery principle, had no other choice. At the same time, the Party was bound by their platform to adhere to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln could not, therefore, accept the idea that individual states could dissolve that Federal Compact. They could not accept the secession of the South. The "irrepressible conflict" had arrived.

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