CHAPTER 13
The defeat of Lincoln was the great matter at issue, and that all others were subordinate.
—JOHN TYLER
Pierce ~ Fillmore ~ Lincoln ~ Tyler ~ Buchanan ~ Van Buren
It was a season for choosing a new chief executive. The former presidents knew how much depended on the result.
From the Clarendon Hotel in New York City, Pierce wrote Jefferson Davis a confidential letter that would later become known to millions. The New Hampshire Democrat encouraged his former secretary of war to run for president, citing support that came not only from their friends but from a movement “rapidly gaining ground in New England.” He added, “Without discussing the question of right—of abstract power to secede, I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood, and if through the madness of northern abolitionism that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason and Dixon’s line merely. It will be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred.” The Union meetings to which Pierce had addressed so many letters “are all in the right direction and well enough for the present,” but “they will not be worth the paper upon which their resolutions are written, unless we can overthrow political abolitionism at the polls and repeal the unconstitutional and obnoxious laws which in the cause of ‘personal liberty’ have been placed upon our statute-books.” Davis, for his part, supported Pierce for the presidency and responded that it was a sentiment shared by many in Mississippi.
Fillmore, who had captured 22 percent of the vote four years earlier, was also receiving calls to seek his old job, though he too was not interested. As the last president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican (a distinction he carries to the present day), Fillmore’s choice was less predictable than that of the others. In the House of Representatives, a member stated “on the best authority” that Fillmore would not support the Republican nominee. Yet it was also reported that Fillmore would support “Bates, Lincoln, Chase, or Seward,” or whoever else the Republicans put forward. One incredulous correspondent called such a claim “a libel on your good name,” written “to injure your friends and to lure them into the Republican camp.” While he did not act publicly to challenge the story, Fillmore did tell one correspondent, “There is no probability that any nomination will be made at Chicago which I can support.” Fillmore would see a number of these reports, including one published in his hometown newspaper, and receive a number of requests for clarification, which he generally disregarded. Which is not to say that he was detached from the outcome. Later that summer he clipped out a newspaper item headlined DISUNION TICKET, quoting supporters of Vice President John C.Breckinridge, “If I had the power, I would dissolve this government in two minutes,” and “Let the Union rip! My voice is for war!”
John Tyler was happy to stay the course. Buchanan “has acquitted himself well in his high office, and if re-nominated I should go to the polls and vote for him with alacrity.” Tyler, for his part, actively sought a return to the presidency. His wife recorded, “The politicians talk of him very freely as being the second choice of at least three candidates.” Tyler had sent a delegation of friends to Charleston to offer his name should there be a Democratic deadlock. After a speech earlier that year at the restoration of the College of William and Mary, he said “Never have I witnessed more enthusiasm on my being toasted. The cheering was immense. I never spoke better. Every sentence was followed by loud applause.” If his name were offered at Charleston, he believed, “the whole south would rally with a shout.”
At the end of April 1860, Democrats met in Charleston’s Institute Hall. In less than eight months, in that very room, South Carolina delegates would formally secede from the Union. The two events were directly related. At the nominating convention, delegates decided to first fight over a platform. There was a majority report, holding that slavery would be allowed in the territories, and at statehood a state could decide to be slave or free. The minority argued simply that the Democratic Party would abide by decisions of the Supreme Court. Balloting for president finally began on May 1. Stephen Douglas dominated the first ballot with 145½ votes, his next closest opponent at 42. Twelve more ballots would follow that night and then forty-five the following day. Douglas never received more than152½, needing 202. Once again the 2/3 rule had returned to wreak havoc with the Democrats. What could the party do? Douglas’s support was solid. It would also never be enough. The Democrats decided to adjourn, to meet again in Baltimore in six weeks’ time.
John Tyler wrote, “The times are so much out of joint as to have excited even with me, secluded as I am from the political world, an extraordinary degree of interest.” The failing of the convention, he said, “filled me with apprehension and regret.”
Meanwhile, the Republicans gathered in Chicago to choose their nominee. All of the strongest candidates had significant weaknesses. Seward, dating from his “higher law” speech against the Compromise of 1850, was seen as too radical, and therefore not competitive in the northern states won by Buchanan. Chase, a former Democrat and ardent abolitionist, was problematic on similar grounds, and did not have the united support of the Ohio delegation. Edward Bates, a Missouri Whig, who had not formally joined the Republicans, had the opposite problem, seen as insufficiently concerned about the expansion of slavery. Lincoln’s dedicated team of managers worked diligently to make him everyone’s second choice. The home state advantage was leveraged to the fullest; the Chicago press strongly advocated for his candidacy in newspapers available to arriving delegates. Lincoln supporters were given counterfeit tickets to the convention, adding to the enthusiasm in the room. The New York and Pennsylvania delegates were seated across the hall from one another, with Lincoln supporters in between, to prevent them from reaching any sort of agreement.
Lincoln was waiting at the Springfield telegraph office when balloting began. The first ballot had gone Seward 173½, Lincoln 102, Simon Cameron 50½ (a temporary placeholder for Pennsylvania’s votes), and Bates 48. Seward narrowly led on the second ballot, 184½ to 181, with a drop for all other candidates. On the third ballot, Lincoln won 231½, 33 short of victory. Lincoln crossed the square to run an errand for his wife Mary. Standing in the door of the shop engaged in conversation, he heard a cry rise up from the crowd outside the telegraph office. A little boy ran across the square yelling, “Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated!” He was soon corroborated by the rush of the crowd toward Lincoln, cheering, “half laughing, half crying, shaking his hand when they could get it, and one another’s when they could not.”
“My friend,” Lincoln said to one, “I am glad to receive your congratulations, and as there is a little woman down on Eighth Street who will be glad to hear the news, you must excuse me until I inform her.”
The Democrats were quick to grasp the brilliance of the Republican pick. Thomas Seymour, the former governor of Connecticut, wrote to Pierce, “In putting up Lincoln they get rid of the odium which attaches to Seward without giving up Seward’s views! We ought to beat them—but madness rules the hour, and no one can tell what is to be our future.”
Jefferson Davis continued to believe that Pierce should be nominated. “We all deplore the want of unanimity as to the candidates among our Southern friends and I do not see any satisfactory solution of the difficulty . . . Our people will support any sound man, but will not vote for a ‘squatter sovereignty’ candidate any more than for a ‘free-soiler.’ If northern men insist upon nominating Douglas, we must be beaten and with such alienation as leaves nothing to hope for in the future of nationality in our organization. I have urged my friends to make an honest effort to save our party from disintegration as the last hope of averting ruin from the country. They would gladly unite upon you . . . I have never seen the country in so great danger, and those who might protect it seem to be unconscious of the necessity.”
Pierce firmly resisted attempts to push him forward for the presidency. “A proposition to use my name at Baltimore, come from what quarter it may, is one which neither you nor any other personal friend understanding my wishes and the reasons for them, can for a moment entertain . . . I cannot doubt that the convention from the names already prominently before it can make an acceptable selection under the established rule, and that such a nomination could be the sure harbinger of victory.”
On June 18, the Democratic National Convention reconvened in Baltimore, at the same church where Martin Van Buren had first been nominated for president. Only South Carolina boycotted. Douglas’s forces resisted seating the delegates who had withdrawn at Charleston, holding their resignation to be irrevocable. In the meantime, pro-Douglas forces in the states that had withdrawn substituted slates of pro-Douglas delegates. The Committee on Credentials was firmly in Douglas’s hands, replacing his previous detractors with their pro-Douglas substitutes. With that, five southern states withdrew, along with Maryland, California, and Oregon. Douglas, in a moment but not a manner in which he could have envisioned, was finally nominated for the presidency. Meanwhile, 231 delegates from nineteen states met in a separate convention across town. Consisting mainly of delegates who had been shut out of the convention, they nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for president. The Democratic Party was officially broken.
One newspaper printed the obituary for the once mighty organization. “The Democratic party is now in a deplorable condition. It is in fact no longer a party. It has no coherence, no strength, no organization.” Another newspaper weighed in on the debate over the party’s cause of death. “Who killed the Democratic Party? You, says Douglas to Breckinridge. You, says Breck to Douglas. You, says Old Buck [Buchanan] to both of them. You, say both to Old Buck. You, say the south to the Democratic allies north. And you, shout back the allies north to the south. You! Thunder out the slave codites to the Douglas repealers of the Missouri compromise. No, you! Echo back the Douglas Repealers and Squatter sovereigntyites.”
Franklin Pierce wrote one of the rejected delegates to Baltimore, a letter published in the Boston Post and widely reprinted, assuring him that his exclusion “looks, in my judgment, a clear violation of right . . . It was vain to hope for harmony after the election of the majority upon the report of the Committee on Credentials.” He said, “It would gratify me exceedingly if our friends in all sections of the land could unite earnestly and cordially in support of Mr. Breckinridge and Gen. Lane, and thus insure for our cause signal victory; but this cannot even be hoped for.”
The Republican ascendency in the summer of 1860 depressed the hopes of all five ex-presidents in equal measure. With the Democrats unable to agree on a nominee, Abraham Lincoln increasingly looked like a winner. By August, Douglas told a Republican senator that he was sure Lincoln would win. His campaign would be therefore dedicated to convincing the South to accept the result. Though nearly destitute, Douglas administered strong medicine to hostile audiences throughout the South, an endeavor one historian would refer to as his finest hour. In Norfolk, Virginia, he addressed a group of seven thousand, telling them plainly that a Lincoln presidency was insufficient to justify secession. He added that the next president “should treat all attempts to break up the Union . . . as Old Hickory treated the Nullifiers in 1832.” In Raleigh he promised to “hang every man higher than Haman who would attempt to resist by force the execution of any provision of the Constitution which our fathers made and bequeathed to us.”
Meanwhile, the 1860 election featured the first and only presidential efforts of the new Constitutional Union Party. Earlier that summer they had nominated former House Speaker John Bell of Tennessee on a ticket dedicated to preserving the Union. At a June 9 Bell rally in New York, a speaker read a letter from Fillmore pledging his support “if his were the only vote in the state.” And it appeared that it might be. Lincoln’s supporters were confident of carrying New York. One especially enthusiastic letter writer to the New York Herald claimed that Fillmore and one other person were the only holdouts in Erie County. “Put that in your pipe, Mr. Bennett [the anti-Lincoln editor of the Herald], and take a good smoke on it under a shady tree, in the cool evening twilight, at Washington Heights.” The day that letter appeared, the Tribune recorded a large gathering of Fillmore supporters who seemed to be coalescing around Lincoln. It would take a significant alliance between the anti-Lincoln factions to win New York, and the Tribune reported that this “formidable combination” headed by “skillful managers” were already “at work to form such a coalition.”
President James Buchanan, titular head of what remained of the Democratic Party, addressed a crowd outside the White House on July 9. “Every Democrat is at perfect liberty to vote as he thinks proper, without running counter to any regular nomination of the party,” he argued to cheers. He strongly preferred Breckinridge to arch-nemesis Douglas. But “The main object . . . is to defeat the election of the Republican candidates; and I shall never oppose an honest and honorable course calculated to accomplish this object.” The Democratic Party was not dead, and would not die, he continued, but “like one of the ancient cedars of Lebanon, it will flourish to afford shelter and protection to that sacred instrument, and to shield it against every storm of faction.” The crowd interrupted with applause. “Now friends and fellow-citizens, it is probable that this is the last political speech that I shall ever make.” The crowd responded with cries such as “We hope not!” But Buchanan, who had entered politics at age twenty-three as a Federalist, knew that he indeed was giving his valedictory. “It is now nearly forty years since I first came to Washington as a member of Congress, and I wish to say this night, that during that whole period I have received nothing but kindness and attention from your fathers and from yourselves. Washington was then comparatively a small town; now it has grown to be a great and beautiful city; and the first wish of my heart is that its citizens may enjoy uninterrupted health and prosperity. I thank you for the kind of attention you have paid to me, and now bid you all a goodnight.” The prolonged cheering of his audience followed Buchanan all the way back into the White House on his way to bed.
Some days later, Tyler wrote his son, “We begin to have more numerous calls by visitors to this region, and I become daily better informed of the status of public opinion . . . . I have much doubt whether any harmony can be brought about. The consequences of Lincoln’s selection I cannot foretell. Neither Virginia, nor North Carolina, nor Maryland (to which you may add Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri) will secede for that. My apprehension, however, is that South Carolina and others of the cotton states will do so, and any attempt to coerce such seceding states will most probably be resisted by all the south.” He noted a “gloom which overspreads and enshrouds the country.” As for Buchanan, “I may do him injustice in regarding him as a mere politician without heart.” Nearly a month later, Tyler was more pessimistic, writing, “The country is undoubtedly in an alarming condition . . . Let things result as they may, I fear that the great republic has seen its last days.”
On August 24, Tyler was the subject of an article in the Baltimore Sun. “This distinguished gentleman spends much of his time during the summer at Old Point, VA and is represented as the centre of the social circle at that popular place of resort. His country villa . . . is always open to strangers, who are entertained by himself and his accomplished lady in a handsome style.” Tyler told the correspondent that he desired to once more visit the capital, to “see the vast improvements that have been made since the close of his own administration. But this, he says, is impossible. As he shall observe the imperative rule established by his predecessors—which is for an ex-President never to visit Washington after the close of his term of office.”* On a trip to New York from Virginia Springs, as he transferred from the steamboat to train depot, Tyler told the journalist “he could plainly see the rapid strides the federal metropolis had made. He never expects to see Washington again.” But Tyler was wrong, and in less than five months, he would make two fateful trips to the capital city. For now, when he was discussed at all, Tyler was an object of fun for much of the country. The New York Daily Tribune, weighing in on the mockery of an ex-congressman for taking a job as a pound keeper, offered “Did not John Tyler, though a poor president, make a first rate Virginia Road-master?”
* Tyler had visited Washington once during his post-presidency to defend Daniel Webster against charges of malfeasance in office. It had been these extreme circumstances that had justified the unusual visit. That the newspaper erroneously believed the rule to be unbroken does reflect the widespread acceptance that former presidents were to stay out of public affairs.
Millard Fillmore had been mum about politics since his comments to the New York unity meeting a year earlier. The life of an ex-president had its advantages, and he was determined to make the most of it. That autumn he and his second wife traveled to New York City to meet the Prince of Wales. The crowd surrounding the 5th Avenue Hotel was so great that no one could enter or leave. Suffering from a head cold and ear infection that rendered him “almost deaf,” Fillmore noted, “Every one seemed to regard it as his special business to talk to me, and I could not without difficulty understand what was said.” Fillmore was content with his mostly private support of John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party, while the other ex-presidents were searching for last minute ways to derail Lincoln’s candidacy.
“A combination of all the [reactionary] forces is necessary to defeat Mr. Lincoln,” Tyler wrote. Though he joined Pierce and Buchanan in supporting Breckinridge, Tyler believed he should withdraw from New York to give Douglas a chance for victory. “To detach New York from his [Lincoln’s] support, or some other of the free states, is supposed to be the only ‘open sesame’ to the hopes of the other candidates.” Tyler agreed to serve as a Virginia candidate for the Electoral College, pledged to Breckinridge. He engaged in a six-hour public debate with supporters of other candidates, and in his opinion, “knocked over four competitors at one and the same time.” He accepted at least one invitation to campaign in Portsmouth on behalf of Breckinridge, who he believed would be chosen by the House of Representatives after an Electoral College deadlock. “The defeat of Lincoln was the great matter at issue,” he stressed, “and that all others were subordinate.”
Martin Van Buren agreed with Tyler. Though a Douglas supporter, he encouraged a strategy to support the strongest Democrat in every state, to cast the election into the House. Pierce, on the other hand, hoped for a clean victory through the nomination of a completely new slate. He wrote, “I fear the true danger to the Union to result from Mr. Lincoln’s election are greater than any of us are willing to anticipate, and yet I have not seen, and do not now see, how the calamity is to be averted. My belief is that if Mr. Breckinridge and Mr. Douglas would voluntarily withdraw, and concur in the nomination of Mr. Guthrie and Gov. Seymour of New York, it is not too late to retrieve our fortunes and defeat sectionalism.” Pierce surely agreed with one of his correspondents who preferred Douglas to Lincoln, writing “rather the ‘Hair Splitter’ than the ‘Rail Splitter.’”
By the end, even Fillmore seemed to be regretting his reticence. In declining an invitation to address a group in Baltimore, he said, “Were it possible at this late period in the Presidential campaign to induce me to abandon the isolation which I formed at its commencement, and comply with your request . . . I should certainly yield to your solicitations.” He was “with them in heart and soul, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. But come what may, I am for the Union and for the whole country, against all sectionalism, and sectional candidates.”
Election Day was November 6. Abraham Lincoln waited for the least difficult time to cross the crowded courthouse square to the courthouse to vote. At 9:00 p.m. in the Springfield telegraph office, visitors were excluded.
John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretaries, would record, “There was never a closer calculator of political probability” than their boss. “All his political life he had scanned tables of returns with as much care and accuracy as he analyzed and scrutinized maxims of government and platforms of parties. Now, as formerly, he was familiar with all the turning-points in contested counties and ‘close’ districts, and knew by heart the value of each and every local loss or gain and its relation to the grand result.” The telegraph operators handed him message after message, which Lincoln placed on his knee, “while he adjusted his spectacles, and then read and re-read several times with deliberation.” The trickle of “encouraging local fragments” became a “shower of congratulatory telegrams.” Above the clicking of the telegraph “he could hear the shouts and speeches of his Springfield followers, gathered in the great hall of the statehouse across the street.” Abraham Lincoln processed the idea that he had been elected president of the United States. The immediate “pleasure and pride,” quickly yielded before the “mighty task and responsibility” that he had inherited. “It seemed as if he suddenly bore the whole world upon his shoulders, and could not shake it off; and sitting there in the yet early watches of the night, he read the still coming telegrams in a sort of absentminded mechanical routine, while his inner man took up the crushing burden of his country’s troubles, and traced out the laborious path of future duties.”
Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes to Douglas’s 1,376,957, Breckinridge’s 849,781, and Bell’s 588,879. Lincoln won 180 electoral votes; Breckinridge 72; Bell 39; Douglas, though closest to Lincoln in the popular vote, carried only the state of Missouri and a smattering of delegates from elsewhere adding up to 12. Despite the predictions and power plays of the former presidents, if all of Lincoln’s opponents would have united, he still would have prevailed with 169 electors, a majority of 35.
“So all is over, and Lincoln elected,” John Tyler wrote. “South Carolina will secede. What other states will do so remains to be seen. Virginia will abide developments . . . We shall see the result. For myself, I rest in quiet, and shall do so unless I see that my poor opinions have due weight.”
“I have never desired to survive the wreck of the Union,” said Franklin Pierce. “With submission to the Providence of God, I do not desire to live to see the day when the flag of my country, with all its stars in their places, will not float at home and abroad.” He said that if he were a southerner, “after so many years of unrelenting aggression, I should probably be doing what they are doing . . . They see Mr. Lincoln elected and they take his election as an endorsement of his opinion that we cannot go on as we are but must in the end be all free or all slave states. Foolish absurd and groundless as this view is and will always stand. The south take his election as an endorsement of resistance” to the fugitive slave act.
A little boy standing in his father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, recalled a man passing by and saying, “Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war.” The intensity of the statement forced Woodrow Wilson to ask his father what it meant. For the rest of his life, this incident would serve as his earliest memory.
Was war inevitable? America had been on the precipice before. Pierce believed that any act by Buchanan “in the way of coercion will drive out all the slave labor states, of that I entertain no doubt.” This thinking was echoed in correspondence to the president, who heard from Charleston Mercury publisher Robert Rhett, the former senator from South Carolina and delegate to their upcoming secession convention. “I have truly sympathized with you in the difficulties which have surrounded your administration of a government tottering amidst the contending sections of the Union,” Rhett wrote. But his condolences came wrapped in a warning. “South Carolina, I have not a doubt, will go out of the Union—and it is in your power to make this event peaceful or bloody. If you send any more troops into Charleston Bay, it will be bloody . . . If you have any hopes of reconstructing the Union, after South Carolina shall have seceded, they will, in my judgment, be utterly defeated by any demonstration of coercion in the Bay of Charleston.”
Buchanan’s cabinet met on November 9. The president, facing an unprecedented challenge, wanted to hold a convention under Article V of the Constitution to try to resolve the situation. “If this were done, and the north or non-slaveholding states should refuse it, the south would stand justified before the whole world for refusing longer to remain in a confederacy where her rights were so shamefully violated.” Four members of the cabinet agreed, while two of them, Secretary of State Lewis Cass and Attorney General Jeremiah Black, favored coercion if necessary. Incredibly, two members of the cabinet, Howell Cobb of Georgia and John Floyd of Virginia, not only argued that the convention would achieve nothing, but that the Union was over, and that the president should accept it as fact. Joseph Holt of Kentucky opposed a convention, fearing that a failure to find a compromise would only embolden the secessionists. The following day, Buchanan proposed in cabinet a proclamation that called upon the South to accept the election results, and to declare secession unlawful, with a subtle reference to the possibility of force if necessary.
That November 10 cabinet meeting was a portrait in miniature of the dividing United States. Cobb believed that secession was not only a fait accompli but a good thing. Thompson of Mississippi shared his views. Floyd of Virginia, who had spoken out against secession in the past but believed in it in the abstract, acquiesced to his more militant colleagues. Cass, Black, Holt, and Isaac Toucey of Connecticut defended the president. The meeting broke up with no conclusion.