 Mr. President and gentlemen of the convention, if we could first know where we are and whether we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it should become alike lawful in all states, old as well as new, north as well as south. This is the introduction to Lincoln's famous house divided speech that he delivered on June 16, 1858, during the Illinois Senate campaign. It's among Lincoln's most famous quotes, and people usually point to it as evidence of Lincoln's ultimate anti-slavery views. Lincoln's a tough figure to understand, and I want to be as honest as possible in my representation of him. Did the people favoring Lincoln? He was more anti-slavery than his rhetoric reveals, and he was just playing the political game. That could be the case, and it's impossible to know for sure because we don't have access to his inner thoughts. He was a politician, and politicians make a career of dishonesty. The question is whether his dishonesty was hiding his anti-slavery views, or exaggerating his anti-slavery views. There are a lot of reasons to doubt Lincoln's sincerity on the issue of slavery, and there are reasons to believe in his sincerity on the issue. People arguing about Lincoln, people on both sides of the debate, like to pick out telling quotes that show that he was a racist on one hand, or sincerely anti-slavery on the other. The quotes taken out of the context of his entire career and his actions as president are hardly informative. He was a complicated man living in a complicated time, and unraveling his motivations and true beliefs is an arduous task, to say the least. My goal in this episode is not to do that. I will probably devote an episode to Lincoln and his complexities much later when I get to his death, so we can look at his entire life and career, but that's a long way off. In this episode, I'd like to look at how he was presenting himself. What was his image? Because whether or not his image reflected his sincere positions or not, it's what informed to the people of both the North and the South during the election of 1860. The people didn't vote for or against Lincoln because of who he actually was. They voted based on who they believed he was. So that's the pivotal issue for this episode, along with the other elements that play into the election of 1860. So I'm going to do my best to present the facts as they are in the narrow context of this election without my commentary on my personal interpretation of Lincoln as a whole. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the past three episodes, we covered the story of John Brown and his infamous raid on Harper's Ferry. John Brown's actions had an enormous effect on the country, especially in the South, and the election of 1860 was influenced by John Brown, whether intentional or not, and whether the perceptions of him were accurate or not. Some historians, like Gary North, considered John Brown one of the three most significant figures in the decision for disunion, and Dr. North, with the general consensus of historians as a whole, agree that Lincoln was also one of the significant figures in the decision for secession. So this episode will be leading us into that momentous decision. James Buchanan won the presidency in 1856, at least in part because the opposition party was in shambles. The Whigs had died off, and the replacement for them was being contested by the New Republican and No-Nothing parties as I covered in my episode on the 1856 election. But in 1860, the Republicans had pretty much cemented themselves as the replacement for the Whigs, though there still were some attempts to dethrone them or institute a third major party, but this time, the Democrat Party was falling apart. But if you just look at the mechanics of the election, being the four-way race and the North-South divide, you don't get the whole picture. What the various parties were actually campaigning to do tells us a lot more about the environment of the country at the time. James Buchanan was the first problem the Democrats had to deal with. Both Republicans and many Democrats viewed his administration as corrupt and dishonest. Republicans would use this to their advantage, but for the Democrats, this was just another thorn in the side of an already splintering party. The scandals that hurt the Buchanan administration were real enough, though it appears that Buchanan didn't play a personal role in them. Even before he was elected, there were reports of voter fraud and vote buying to help get him elected, and a fair number of lower-level Democrat Party members seemed to have engaged in corrupt dealings, like giving their friends lucrative government contracts and things of this nature. The first major scandal of the Buchanan administration to hit the press was called the Fort Snelling Swindle. Buchanan's Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, sold the fort, which included 7,500 acres of land in the Minnesota territory, to a Democratic appointee. He did not announce that the fort was being put up for sale, and he did not take bids. The final price was $90,000, but the property was estimated to be valued at between $1 and $2 million, and the sale was passed by adding a clause to an Army Appropriations Bill just before the bill was passed. The bill was signed in June of 1857, and a few weeks later, newspapers were running headlines about the Fort Snelling Swindle. Another scandal came out regarding government printing contracts. The government printing office came into existence in 1861, but before this, any printed materials had to be contracted out to private printers, and printing was a big industry at the time when all the type had to be set meticulously. So these were lucrative government contracts. But it came out that printing contracts during the Buchanan administration were not being granted to the lowest bidder, but were instead handpicked by the president or a congressman, and the contracts were typically given to somebody who then subcontracted the printing to somebody else. So it was basically just an unnecessary middleman, so some friend of a politician could pocket some taxpayer money. One of the Democrat publishers, a guy named Cornelius Wendell, made millions through this kind of graft, and he eventually admitted to Congress that he donated $100,000 to Democrat campaigns. So in 1858, some of these abuses were revealed, and in 1860, the House Covode Committee made some even more significant revelations about the scandal. But the Covode Committee brought up questions about the legal role of Congress in investigating a president. Republican John Covode proposed the committee, which would be formed to five members of the House of Representatives to investigate the printing abuses. But Democrats fired back that they could only legally do this if the investigation was part of an impeachment hearing. Buchanan himself even made a statement saying that the House had no legal authority to investigate him or his administration, which elicited a predictable response from Republicans. One newspaper called him King James Bull, and basically accused him of acting like a monarch. But the Covode Committee was formed, and it held secret meetings that the Democrats pejoratively dubbed star chamber proceedings, and they interviewed a series of witnesses. The Buchanan administration may have been corrupt, but so was the Covode Committee. They secretly leaked any damaging testimony to Republican journalists, but they kept secret any testimonies that could be used in defense of Buchanan. Republicans also printed and distributed about 10,000 copies of the Covode Committee findings, which were damaging enough that many Democrats wanted nothing to do with Buchanan. This only ended up inflaming the North-South divide in the Democrat Party. One of the revelations claimed that Buchanan spent nearly a million dollars in 1858 to push for Kansas to be admitted as a slave state, and some witnesses said that the administration had used money they donated to bribe congressmen to support the pro-slavery Lacompton Constitution for Kansas. This was problematic in its own right, but it was also something of a middle finger to Stephen Douglas, who had made popular sovereignty as primary issue. The Covode Committee also revealed that Buchanan had reappointed a known criminal to the position of Chicago Postmaster, specifically because the guy was a known enemy of Stephen Douglas. Douglas and Buchanan already had a tense relationship, but they split completely before the 1860 election, and Douglas at this time was the most prominent Northern Democrat, so he was able to take some Democrats with him. But while most people looking at this election focused on the split between the North and the South, which is understandably important, the split in the North between the pro and anti-Buchanan Democrats is also a contributing factor to the disintegration of the party. These divisions bled into the controversy over slavery, which the Democrats couldn't seem to agree on. All Democrats seem to agree that slavery should be an issue left to the people of a given territory, but they did not agree on the time that such a decision could be made. Douglas believed that they should be able to vote on this as soon as they had a population large enough to choose a territorial legislature. But Southern Democrats criticized this as being squad or sovereignty, and said that slavery should be decided at a constitutional convention when the territory was applying for statehood. So up to that point, there should be no authority blocking Southern slave owners from bringing their slaves into a territory. But the Dred Scott decision should have done away with this conflict and the ruling that all territories must allow the entrance of slaves until statehood completely undermined Douglas and his campaign for popular sovereignty. Douglas had been working hard to position himself for the presidency, but between the Kansas-Nebraska debacle and the Dred Scott decision, things were looking grim for the little giant, as he was called. While Stephen Douglas was famous throughout the country, Abraham Lincoln was relatively unknown, having only served as a single-term congressman before he decided to challenge Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat in 1858. Keep in mind this is still before senators were popularly elected, so challenging a Senate seat wasn't the same as it would be today. People voted on the state legislature and the state legislature appointed senators, so appeals to the people weren't useless, but there was a barrier between popular sentiment and senatorial appointments that no longer exists thanks to the 17th Amendment. Illinois was not a slave state, but it was one of the most racist free states at the time. It had never passed a personal liberty law and the state made free black immigration illegal. So Douglas campaigned against Lincoln by calling him a quote unquote black Republican, which was the common pejorative against Republican candidates by Democrats. Lincoln wanted to capitalize on the unpopularity of the Dred Scott decision in the North, and he made it a major campaign point, but the details of his opposition to it are worth noting. I think I mentioned briefly in the Dred Scott episode that Lincoln professed a conspiracy theory about the ruling blaming its delay on the quote unquote slave power that was the common demagoguery in the North. Lincoln believed that Stephen Douglas, who Charles Sumner had called the squire of slavery, had participated in the beginnings of the conspiracy by guiding the compromise of 1850 through Congress and then furthered the conspiracy by sponsoring the unpopular Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Dred Scott decision, Lincoln believed, was the third step in making the entire country open to slavery and the final step would be to make the free states safe for slavery as well. Part of the evidence for the conspiracy theory is the unknown words exchanged between James Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the decision by the court to delay the opinion until after Buchanan's election. The theory is implausible, of course. Republican Justice John McLean supported the delay so there were clearly neutral motives for avoiding a decision before a heated election. And the idea that Stephen Douglas was deliberately working to make slavery legal in the entire country was rather far-fetched to put it generously. That said, the Dred Scott decision was clearly politically motivated and the fear of the slave power by the North wasn't entirely delusional, even if it was highly exaggerated. But Lincoln's accusations of these direct and preconceived machinations by Douglas appear to be entirely ridiculous. In the House-Divided Speech, Lincoln assured everybody that he agreed with the court's ruling that Dred Scott was a slave. Lincoln said in a speech on July 10th of 1858, quote, if I wanted to take Dred Scott from his master, I would be interfering with property and that terrible difficulty that Judge Douglas, refers to Stephen Douglas as in Illinois, he was referred to as Judge Douglas for his entire career because of his time as an Illinois judge. That Judge Douglas speaks off of interfering with property would arise, but I am doing no such thing as that. Lincoln makes it clear in the speech that he does not take objection to the court's ruling on Dred Scott's slave status. Now, defenders of Lincoln will argue that he is simply taking the pragmatic political position given the environment of the day and there's probably some truth to that, but I'm just presenting the facts here and you can make your own judgments on the matter. But of course, Lincoln also says that he opposes the opinion of the court that ruled that slavers should be allowed in the territories and were he in Congress, he would vote against the extension of slavery in the territories, which was the Republican position, regardless of the Supreme Court ruling. Lincoln and all Republicans were consistent on this matter, that of the extension of slavery. Republicans varied in degrees of radicalism regarding slavery overall, but there was party consistency on the matter of territorial slavery. In his famous House Divided Speech of the Debates, Lincoln brings up the conspiracy again, he says, quote, in what cases the power of the states is so restrained by the US Constitution is left an open question, precisely as the same question as to the restraint on the power of the territories was left open in the Nebraska Act. But that and that together and we have another nice little niche which we may air long see filled with another Supreme Court decision declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits, end quote. Obviously this ties into Lincoln's thesis and the speech that was provided in my introductory quote at the beginning of the episode. To be clear though, Lincoln was not arguing for the abolition of slavery or even to take any legislative action to end it. He made that abundantly clear throughout his campaign in 1858 and his campaign in 1860 as well as his actions in the first two years of his presidency. He was arguing that by blocking the extension of slavery it would eventually die a natural death and he was juxtaposing this option with the demagogic assertion that the alternative was the extension of slavery to the free states. I call it demagogic because it doesn't seem to be based on any real evidence from any Democrat politician. Nobody was making an argument in favor of this but Lincoln wanted to challenge Douglas more directly. So he challenged Douglas to a series of debates and Douglas agreed to participate in seven such confrontations. This might have been a mistake for Douglas. He was giving a relatively unknown opponent a platform that would help rapidly increases notoriety. So Douglas likely had a lot more to lose from these debates than he had to win. The first debate took place on August 21st, 1858 and the last debate occurred on October 15th. And the second debate Lincoln challenged Douglas directly on the issue of popular sovereignty in light of the Dred Scott ruling. And because the debate took place in Freeport, Illinois Douglas's answer to the Dred Scott decision has become known as the Freeport Doctrine. The next question proposed to me by Mr. Lincoln is can the people of a territory in any lawful way against the wishes of any citizens of the United States exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a state constitution? I answer emphatically as Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois that in my opinion the people of a territory can by lawful means exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a state constitution. It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a territory under the constitution that people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere. Unless it is supported by local police regulations those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature and if the people are opposed to slavery they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. If on the contrary they are for it their legislation will favor its extension. Hence no matter what the decision of the Supreme Court may be on that abstract question still the right of the people to make a slave territory or a free territory is perfect and complete under the Nebraska bill. So Douglas was arguing that the territorial legislature could not enforce the exclusion of slavery but they were not obligated to enforce the protection of it. Douglas was trying to present this doctrine as if it was consistent with what he'd always believed but of course it was really him retroactively fitting his popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott ruling. The Lincoln-Douglas debates are also pointed to his evidence of Lincoln's racism but Lincoln's racism isn't really contested by historians. Some people present to Lincoln as being more ahead of his time on race than he was but this is just general ignorance not something that serious historians try to defend outside of maybe an exception here and there but Douglas did use the debates as a deliberate attempt to paint Lincoln as an abolitionist and this is important to recognize. I said in the introduction that the purpose of this episode was to understand the impression of Lincoln held by people in the country regardless of whether or not their impression is correct. In the very first Lincoln-Douglas debate Stephen Douglas says of Lincoln quote, Mr. Lincoln following the example and lead of all the little abolition orators who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches reads from the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal and then asks how can you deprive a Negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him? He and they maintained that Negro equality is guaranteed by the laws of God and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence. If they think so, of course they have the right to say so and so vote. I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the Negro was made his equal and hence is his brother. This line elicited laughter from the audience but for my own part, I do not regard the Negro as my equal and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever end quote. I stress the importance of the perceptions of the candidates because that's what drove the individual actions of the people at the time. But when arguing about the history people typically ignore the very real perceptions and focus on the reality of the figures in cases such as this and political elections the false perceptions can often tell us more than the true positions. Lincoln was not an abolitionist obviously but he was being branded as one and after John Brown's escapades Southerners viewed abolitionists as violent which was general nonsense. Southerners viewed the North as being largely populated by abolitionists which was general nonsense. And Southerners viewed the Republican Party as being a party of abolitionists which was general nonsense. But the fact that all these beliefs were nonsense doesn't change the fact that this is what Southerners believed. And if you look at the records it is Southerners and Democrats who are calling Lincoln an abolitionist not the people in the North. So Douglas was playing on this misconception. He was painting Lincoln as an abolitionist to play off the unpopularity of abolitionism especially after John Brown's raid. Throughout most of the 1850s abolitionists were gaining increasing sympathy in the North and John Brown's violent actions undid a lot of this. So abolitionists were as unpopular as ever and the South both feared them and believed them to be more common than they actually were. Perception as they say is reality. In this speech on the debate Lincoln refuted Douglas's accusations that he believed inequality between the races. Lincoln said, quote, I will say here while upon this subject that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two which in my judgment will probably forever forbid they're living together upon the footing of perfect equality. And in as much as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference I as well as Judge Douglas am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary. End quote. This is an important quote but most people making an anti-Lincoln argument in the quote there. It is important to read the rest of Lincoln's quote to get an honest representation of what he was arguing. He went on to say, quote, but I hold that not withstanding all this there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The crowd sheared at this line. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas. He is not my equal in many respects certainly not in color perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else which his own hand earns. He is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man. End quote. So I promised to that Lincoln was complicated and here's a good example of it. Lincoln was obviously a racist. He believed in common racial theories such as the intellectual and moral inferiority of blacks but even many abolitionists believe this but Lincoln did say that they deserved equal rights and this is an important distinction. Lincoln did make moral arguments against slavery. I highlight that not as a defense of Lincoln but because it is a categorical difference between him and some Republicans. Prior to emancipation Republicans are generally categorized into three groups radicals moderates and conservatives. The radicals like Charles Sumner believed that slavery should be abolished though unlike the abolitionists they were more political in their approach to the abolition of slavery. Sumner for instance believed that it required a constitutional amendment which is why Lysander Spooner excoriated him in a letter in 1864. Moderate Republicans such as Lincoln himself did not believe in the abolition of slavery. They only supported blocking the extension of slavery into new territories but in contrast with the conservative Republicans like former Democrat David Wilmot the moderates did make a moral argument against slavery. Some people will argue that Lincoln's moral arguments were not sincere and Lincoln's personal history does give some weight to such an interpretation but whether or not Lincoln held sincere moral convictions is meaningless in the context of the 1860 election. The fact that he was making moral arguments against slavery despite his racist qualifications and assurances that he did not support the abolition of slavery, many Democrats especially in the South saw this as proof that he was an abolitionist. As a brief aside historian Michael Holt actually labels Lincoln a radical Republican for his willingness to make moral arguments but he supports this not by offering any new evidence on Lincoln but by offering a different definition of the term radical than historians typically use. So according to his definition of radical Lincoln tautologically qualifies but Holt is being equivocal. The typical accepted category of a radical Republican is one who advocated the outright abolition of slavery in some form or another and Lincoln simply did not support this until it was militarily beneficial to him in the middle of a war he seemed to be losing. I think Michael Holt is a good historian don't get me wrong but I find his recategorization of Lincoln here to be disingenuous. But the most important theme of the debates as the introductory quote about the house divided establishes is that of unionism. Lincoln and Douglas were debating over the issue of slavery but when talking about it Lincoln made clear that he was a unionist first and foremost. By saying that the country would become all slave or all free he was saying that he did not believe that the country could split. He said quote, I do not expect the union to be dissolved. End quote. Unlike David Webster in previous years Lincoln was not making an explicit threat of war but such threats had been made. And because of the history of politicians like Webster who if you remember said that disunion would bring about quote such a war as I will not describe. It was hardly delusional for people to interpret Lincoln's denial of the possibility of union as a veiled threat of war. But like much of what Lincoln said people then and now were taking vague assertions and inferring them according to their own biases. So Lincoln's ambiguity serves the arguments of both the pro and anti-Lincoln folks and it also demonstrates that he was above all else a very skilled politician. The Democrats held the first party convention for the 1860 election which opened in Charleston, South Carolina on April 23rd. The decision to hold the convention in Charleston was a capitulation to Southern delegates during the Cincinnati convention for the 1856 election. When the convention opened President Buchanan had already decided that John C. Breckenridge a Kentucky politician and friend of Franklin Pierce was the best option to stop the nomination of Stephen Douglas. He would be more popular in the South of course but Douglas was the most popular Northern Democrat. Both the candidates of the party platforms were contested. Northern Democrats wanted to nominate Douglas on the Cincinnati platform established in the previous election. This platform included things that are easier to understand in light of some of the previous episodes in the season. It resolved to faithfully enforce the fugitive slave law of 1850 which was part of the compromise that Douglas played an important role in. The platform advocated the annexation of Cuba which is less surprising to people who know about the filibustering episodes in Cuba that are so often left out of antebellum histories. The Cincinnati platform also essentially recognized the Dred Scott decision. The platform referred to decisions by the Supreme Court but the context is clear enough and avoided any direct reference to popular sovereignty or the Freeport doctrine. It acknowledged the differences within the party on the matter of territorial slavery but the platform only promised to abide by the constitution on the matter which basically dances around the issue since people couldn't agree on the proper constitutional position in the first place. The Southern Democrats responded with their own Alabama platform as it was called. This was much more explicit on the matter of slavery. It demanded a federal slave code for any territory that failed to pass protective legislation for slavery. So they were more directly responding to Douglas's Freeport doctrine and saying that they would have none of it. The Southern delegates hoped that this would convince the Northern delegates to acquiesce but instead the convention devolved into Democrat infighting between the North and the South. The disagreements in the convention were intense. When Hendrick Wright at Pennsylvania voted for the Cincinnati platform, most of the Pennsylvania delegates supported Buchanan in the Alabama platform so the North-South divide wasn't a clean sectional divide but when Henry Wright voted for this platform, a young customs collector at the convention punched him in the mouth. A compromise platform called the Tennessee platform was proposed that dropped references to a federal slave code but there weren't enough delegates willing to compromise and this was never passed. The Cincinnati platform was adopted and Stephen Douglas was nominated. This incensed Southern delegates who wanted a platform that made explicit protection for slavery and nearly all of the deep South delegates walked out. The exceptions being the Georgia delegates even though Senator Robert Toomes had telegraphed instructions for them to join the protest. The next morning, 26 of Georgia's 37 delegates decided to join the walkout as well. A handful of Upper South delegates also walked out but most of them stayed. So Stephen Douglas won nomination for the Democrat ticket on the Cincinnati platform but the Southern faction of the party which was a pretty large faction refused to support him. The Democrats would hold the first convention for the election and the Southern Democrats would end up holding the last convention as well. With the split between Northern and Southern Democrats disunion was a legitimate fear that many people in the country were facing. It was clear that the Republican party would only encourage Southern secession so a third party was formed called the Constitutional Union Party. The purpose of this party was singularly to avoid disunion and the original proposed name for the party was the National Union Party before the word national was changed to constitutional. The final name better reflected the platform which had two planks. The first was the recognition of the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws which again made no assertion as to what a correct interpretation of the Constitution actually was. The ambiguity was probably deliberately intended to appeal to attract anybody who had their own personal interpretation of the Constitution. But the phrase enforcement of the laws more heavily implied adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decisions to many people. The second plank was Frank Unionism and the language of the platform borrowed from the preamble of the Constitution which appeals to the more perfect union that the Constitution professed to establish. The themes of this new party was to treat the word sectional as a cuss word presenting itself as the middle of the road option and to appeal to the honest Democrats who were disgusted by the corruption of the Buchanan administration. Their strategy was essentially to attract former Whigs who weren't on board with the Republican party and former Democrats who were disgusted by Buchanan. Some members of this new party advocated a plank supporting a protective tariff as well hoping that it would help attract some former Whigs. The only platform that did call for a protective tariff would be the Republican platform. I've taken some heat in the past for contesting this notion that the South seceded over tariffs. I have an article in the Mises Wire about this and one thing that I didn't mention but I should have is the conspicuous absence of any plank regarding the tariff in either of the Democrat platforms. I'll talk more about that narrative in the next episode but it is worth mentioning that in the 1860 election the Democrats were simply not concerned with the tariff question. They certainly still held opposition to the protective tariff and there are some quotes here and there from Democrats reminding us of this but it just wasn't a priority at this point as the focus was almost exclusively on the slavery question and the only planks not related to slavery and the Democratic platforms were the two supporting the annexation of Cuba and supporting subsidies for the construction of the Pacific Railroad. Both the Republicans and Democrats by the way supported national support for the transcontinental railroad but the Constitutional Union Party was also very revealing as to the prominence of the slavery question at the time and its role in the threat of disunion. Jerry Clemens published a very widely read public letter that said quote, one of the main objects of the union organization is to get rid of slavery as a political question to bring back the times when parties were divided upon banks, tariffs, internal improvements, foreign relations and other legitimate subjects, end quote. In response to the Constitutional Union Party's claim that it wanted to avoid the slavery question a Democratic newspaper in Kentucky, the Kentucky Statesman published an editorial that said quote, it is insulting to the intelligence of the American people to attempt to organize any party which will ignore the slavery question. That issue must be met and settled. The subject of domestic slavery now overshadows every other issue in American politics and its consideration cannot be escaped in the pending national canvas. The coming presidential election will turn upon that question, end quote. So I don't wanna beat a dead horse but I received enough backlash for my article that secession was not motivated by tariffs that I feel it's worth really hammering this stuff home. I'm not trying to take sides in the historical controversy over Southern secession at the Confederacy. I really feel like it's a bit silly how much people take sides on this matter and I was born and raised in the deep South but I'm interested in presenting the history as accurately as possible and the facts of the matter make it pretty much indisputable to me that slavery was the driving issue particularly in the South. The Constitutional Union Party nominated John Bell for their presidential candidate. Bell had supported the compromise of 1850 but opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His opposition was explicitly because he anticipated the very controversy the act brought about and he opposed the pro-slavery Lacompton Constitution in Kansas as well. So he seemed like the perfect middle ground candidate but John Bell was from a slave state, Tennessee. So he was an upper South politician and Southern Democrats accused him of being a traitor to the South. Now I said that the slavery issue was the primary issue particularly in the South because the Republicans were also interested in downplaying the importance of slavery though they weren't avoiding the issue like the Constitutional Union Party. The Republicans offered the largest platform and they reaffirmed their position on the recent controversies. Slavery should not be extended to the territories, Kansas should be admitted as a free state and the African slave trade should not be reopened though this last point was in response to a relatively marginal position among Southerners and the Constitution of the Confederacy would end up prohibiting the slave trade from the very outset itself. The Republican platform also called for a Pacific Rail React as I mentioned earlier and a Homestead Act both of which would be passed during the Lincoln presidency. More importantly, the platform took a hard line position on the issue of disunion, refusing to acknowledge it as a possibility. This is important in understanding the Southern perception of the Republican administration right before the war began. I said before that it was not delusional for Southerners to interpret ambiguous Republican rhetoric as veiled threats of war and this platform plank is a good example of it. The platform did not say if the South secedes we will wage war with them but it did say quite explicitly that quote unquote threats of disunion were treasonous. That this beg to the question of how a Republican administration would react to secession is quite obvious and it is reasonable to see this as a threat of force against attempts at peaceful secession regardless of where you stand on the issue personally. Most of the text in the platform was addressing in length the grievances over Kansas and the Dred Scott decision but the Republican party was nonetheless trying to take a moderate approach. If you remember the episode I did on the election of 1856, I noted how the shift from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party to the Republican Party reflected consistent moves toward the political center and the shift from 1856 to 1860 continued this pattern. John C. Vermont wasn't a radical on slavery he was less moderate than Lincoln was. Lincoln is classified as a moderate because he did make moral arguments against slavery in his speeches but his actual policy positions weren't any different than the conservative Republicans so he was politically pretty soft on the slavery issue. Again we can debate all day about whether this was pragmatic or sincere or how anti-slavery he really was inside his own head but that debate can never be definitively settled but when the Republicans were deciding on their candidate moderation was what they were looking for. Although they took a firm stance on the expansion of slavery they wanted to be a middle of the road party as well. Many people thought that William Seward was going to gain the nomination and some historians have exaggerated Seward's opposition to slavery. He's often painted as being more radical than Lincoln but he was very much a moderate on slavery as well. He invoked the higher law doctrine in opposition to the compromise of 1850 which has made people interpret him as a radical but his two speeches that people point to for this were given in front of very anti-slavery crowds in the North and his radicalism is not consistent elsewhere so these radical speeches were probably just pandering to Northerners who were more radical than he himself was. The other major contender was Sam and Pete Chase but his reputation was harmed by his past friendships with Southern Democrats in Congress including Jefferson Davis who Chase allied with in opposition to the compromise of 1850. Unlike Seward, he was a clear compromiser and this was also a problem for many Republicans. Like Seward, Abraham Lincoln was a moderate but he was more moderate in that he explicitly rejected the higher law doctrine. He called slavery a moral but it was not a natural law issue like it was to some people but he did paint the divide between the North and the South to be between those who believed that slavery was morally right and those who believed it to be morally wrong so it was a good compromise within the Republican Party. The conservatives agreed with his soft policies but the radicals were sympathetic to his moral rhetoric and the radical Republicans were still a lot less radical than actual abolitionists which is why historians make a distinction between those categories as well. So there was a lot of recognition among many radicals regarding political pragmatism as well but Lincoln's moderation was also easy to deal with politically because he had almost no political history so unlike Seward, it was easy for the party to market him to the various demographics on the slavery issue. In other words, the ambiguity on Lincoln that contributes to the modern debate over him was one of the things that made him a favorable candidate. His true positions were difficult to pin down and he could be presented as more radical to some camps because of his moralizing and more conservative to other camps because of his racism and policy compromises. This also helped his supporters to market him as the only honest candidate which is where the myth of honest Abe was derived. It was a campaign narrative meant to juxtapose Lincoln with the corrupt Buchanan administration and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 had amplified his national presence. In 1859, Lincoln gave another important speech in Cooper Union. In it, he denounced John Brown by name and he said that if Southerners voted Republican it wouldn't be a sectional party which is kind of a silly and circular claim I think. You don't vote for us because we're sectional but we won't be sectional if you vote for us. In his speech, Lincoln established that his Republican party believed that slavery should not be extended because slavery is morally wrong. Again, I highlight the moral arguments Lincoln made because they are vital and understanding how he was perceived. To the South, moral opposition to slavery was abolitionism. All practical distinctions were moot and despite Lincoln's denunciation of Brown Southerners saw John Brown as representative of abolitionists. In other words, all abolitionists were violent who wanted to incite insurrection in the South. This is also important to understand because it helps us understand why non-slave owners opposed to the Republicans and supported secession. Slave insurrection was a terrifying notion regardless of whether or not you owned slaves and in Southern minds, if Lincoln was elected it would be evidence that most people in the North were abolitionists regardless of what promises Lincoln himself made about slavery. So the possible election of Lincoln was a threat not just because Lincoln the moderate was president but because his election indicated that the majority of the Northern population wanted violent slave uprisings. Southern perception on these matters was undeniably incorrect, but the fact that this was the perception is vital in understanding their actions, especially the actions of non-slave owning Southerners. Southerners would have opposed any Republican nominee the way they did Lincoln. They always referred to Republicans as black Republicans just as Stephen Douglas did and they saw the Republican party as an abolitionist party and in the South this was constantly explicitly stated in newspapers and political speeches. So Lincoln became the Republican nominee but it was the party more than the man that Southerners were afraid of. Southern Democrats held their own convention after Stephen Douglas was nominated for the presidential ticket. Without the Northern opposition it was easy to nominate John C. Breckenridge for president and past the Alabama platform and the Deep South the only state that seemed to be divided between the two Democratic parties was Georgia which had the largest population among all the Deep South states. It would be incorrect to say that all these people were secessionists. Breckenridge himself was largely popular because he had never advocated secession. Now there was obvious recognition among many people that the split in the Democratic party would likely lead to an election outcome that would drive people to secession. Some Southerners certainly wanted exactly this. These would be the so-called fire eaters. Others simply wanted better protections for slavery but they didn't really want secession. These would be conditional unionists. I'm gonna talk more about all of this in the next episode but I wanna make sure it's clear that the Southern Democrats were not unified on the matter of secession. There were even some people who were unconditional unionists. They opposed to disunion even if a Republican was elected. Benjamin Butler is a great example of this. He wasn't technically a Southern Democrat but he was politically a Southern Democrat in the sense that he supported all the Southern positions on slavery and he supported John C. Breckenridge in the election of 1860. In fact, before Breckenridge was nominated Butler supported Jefferson Davis as the presidential candidate but Butler was an unconditional unionist and would serve as a union general and he would even be the general who established the policy of labeling fugitive slaves as contraband of war and refusing to return them to their owners even when Lincoln was still trying to enforce the fugitive slave law during the war. His example is helpful in understanding that the policies on slavery passed during the war were tactical rather than principled or even political but Breckenridge was nominated as the Southern Democratic candidate in 1860 saw a four-way race essentially between Lincoln the Republican, Douglas the Northern Democrat, John Bell the constitutional unionist and Breckenridge the Southern Democrat. One notable innovation in this election is the personal campaigning by candidates. Prior to this election it was unheard of for candidates to campaign for themselves. It was seen as immodest and unbecoming so supporters handled the campaigning but Douglas actually did travel the country and campaign on his own behalf. We take it for granted today that this is how politics is done but at the time that was unheard of. Douglas fared the worst only winning one state, Missouri. John Bell did well in the border states and Breckenridge took the South. Lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in any deep South state and Lincoln of course took the North winning most of the non-slave states. States like California demonstrated the importance of the split of the Democrats. Lincoln won California but he only beat Stephen Douglas by a little more than 600 votes and he only beat Breckenridge by about 4,000 votes. The constitutional union party in fact earned nearly 10,000 votes in California. Slave states had a much larger turnout than free states as well and in fact many free states actually saw a decrease in voter turnout than in 1856. Of his 1.9 million votes Lincoln only gained about 26,000 of those from slave states and those being the border states since you couldn't vote for him in the deep South even if you wanted to but Lincoln only gained 39.9% of the popular vote. Some states also ran a fusion Democrat ticket rather than splitting the two Democrat candidates so it's impossible to give a full popular vote count for Stephen Douglas but it's still clear that southerners largely failed to support Douglas despite his traveling to the South to campaign. A month before the election South Carolina's governor William Henry Gist wrote to the governors of every cotton state except for Texas to tell them that if Lincoln was elected which seemed inevitable South Carolina would almost certainly secede. He also ordered the South Carolina legislature to assemble on November 5th the day before the election. He wanted to be ready to act in the likely event that Lincoln was elected president. Gist met with other political leaders in his state near the end of October to discuss what should be done if the other slave states were not willing to secede. After some deliberations they decided that South Carolina would secede with or without the rest of the South. Lincoln of course did win the electoral majority and he became the first president elected without a single electoral vote from the South which only further proved the North-South divide and South Carolina made good on its word to secede nearly a month before the second Southern state joined them. The first wave of secession will be the topic of the next episode. For more content like this visit mesus.org