CHAPTER 20
On the first day of May, the previous night’s moonlight reverie looked premature. In the tropical daylight, Charleston’s stuccoed mansions redisplayed their rainbow of colors. Almost all the Upper South’s majority of southern delegates resumed their work in Institute Hall. They sought compromises that could lure the Lower South minority of the southern minority back into the Democracy.
The departing minority of southern delegates gathered in Military Hall. Most of the seceders hoped that the party might be reconstructed. Rhett, scorning all parties and their reconstructions, now could despair in his choice of galleries, both hanging over Southerners who remained uncertain whether to finalize the Democracy’s ruin.
– 1 –
Yancey derided the shrunken Institute Hall proceedings as the “Rump Convention.” Rump or not, a presidential nominee still had to garner two-thirds of the delegates. But two-thirds of what number? Douglas’s supporters prayed that two-thirds of the remaining delegates would suffice. Some Douglasites had even cynically hoped that an anti-Douglas surge out of the convention would occur. Departing delegates, according to this fantasy, would lower the two-thirds bar, allowing two-thirds of the remaining delegates to nominate Douglas.
But Caleb Cushing, Massachusetts’s southward-leaning chair of the convention, ruled that a presidential nominee still needed two-thirds of the original delegates. New Yorkers joined Southerners in sustaining the chair’s ruling.1 The supportive Yankees may have feared that more Southerners would leave Institute Hall if the convention majority changed procedures in midstream. The New Yorkers assuredly feared that southern voters would reject the convention’s nominee if southern citizens considered Douglas’s nomination illegitimate. Some may have also thought, as Georgia’s Martin Crawford cynically surmised, that after the fullest two-thirds rule stymied both Douglas and the Southerners, presidential lightning would strike one of them.
Lightning could strike no one after the convention sustained Cushing’s ruling and the Douglas delegates refused to remove the Little Giant’s candidacy. To secure two-thirds of the original delegates, Douglas needed nineteen southern votes, even if every Northerner voted for him. Instead, almost a quarter of the Yankees voted against Douglas, and his southern support peaked at nine and a half votes (compared to the twelve Southerners who had swallowed his platform). Of the South’s under 10 percent of delegates who could tolerate Douglas’s candidacy, only one represented the world below the Border South and half represented Missouri (whose Austin King placed Douglas in nomination; Yancey must have choked on that supposed recreancy!). The Upper South rejected Douglas’s candidacy more solidly than the whole South had rejected his platform.2
Southern Democrats’ unshakable renouncing of Douglas showed that no merely procedural difficulty caused the party’s split. If the Democracy’s nomination had required a simple majority rather than two-thirds of the delegates, Douglas would have snuck off with the prize (with a half vote to spare). But he would not have been the nominee of the National Democracy. The Lower South, having divided the party over Douglas’s dread platform, would surely have also divided the Democracy over the dread man himself. The Upper South, preferring any other candidate to Douglas, would have preferred the Lower South’s alternate candidate, who would likely have been an Upper South Democrat (most likely Virginia’s Robert M. T. Hunter).
Nor did the decision to select the platform before the candidate cause the convention split. A consistent 90 percent of Southerners considered the opponent of the Lecompton Constitution and proponent of the Freeport Doctrine unelectable in the South (and detestable). An equally consistent 75 percent of Northerners considered only Douglas electable in the North (and sublime). No technical convention rule or tactical convention strategy could dissolve that standoff over the highest priority of national convention delegates: what man can be elected, especially in our own backyard.
Southern delegates’ intransigent opposition to Douglas, even after the most intransigent 43 percent of the Southerners quit the convention, left Douglas intransigents with a loathing of all things southern (especially Charleston!) as towering as southern loathing for Owen Lovejoy. South Carolina’s Congressman John Ashmore, a soothing Orr admirer, claimed that “moderate men” could have nominated a decent Southerner on a decent platform except for “the obstinate & offensive course of the friends of Douglas,” who “damn the South with great fury, saying that they can go to Hell.” Northern Democrats’ “exasperation and bitterness toward the South,” added the convention’s most illuminating reporter, Murat Halstead, feeds upon Southerners’ “gross repudiation of the only ground upon which they could stand in the North.” Yankees fulminate “more uncharitably and rancorously … about the South, her institutions, and particularly her politicians” than I have ever “heard Abolitionists talk.”3
As uncharitable rancor consumed Institute Hall delegates, as their deadlock persisted through fifty-seven roll call votes, as the discomfort on Hibernian Hall’s second floor turned horrendous, as Charlestonians’ jeers turned nasty, as faro bankers and pickpockets snatched up too many of Yankees’ last dollars, Northern Democrats needed a change. So they decided to move the convention to less hateful surroundings and climes, hopefully with less hateful Southerners as delegates. On May 3, the third futile day after the Cotton South’s departure, the rump remnant of the National Democratic Convention voted to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18. “The Democratic party of the several States,” urged the exit resolution, should fill “all vacancies in their respective delegations to this Convention.”4
– 2 –
Less than twenty-four hours after departing Institute Hall, the seceding Cotton South delegates convened in Charleston’s Military Hall. Charleston disunionists prayed that these political warriors would emulate the building’s name. The seceders should declare war on Institute Hall. They should nominate their own candidate. Then they should go home. Their irretrievable exit would bury all hope of party reconstruction.
Yancey at first shared this intransigent strategy. But according to his highest strategic priority, he had to hang back with Lower South troops, so long as they joined him in reasonable tests of Northerners’ toleration for a moderate southern ultimatum. Then the testers would charge with him, after Yankees flunked the tests.
In Military Hall, Yancey saw that many hoped for further tests. Almost all seceders from Institute Hall wished to pass a “when necessary” platform plank (which they promptly did) but then pause before nominating their own presidential candidate. They meant to wait and see whether their departure turned the Northern Democracy around.5 If Douglasites tardily realized that party survival hinged on dropping Douglas, the National Democracy could reunite behind a southern candidate. If Yankees instead insisted on Douglas, Military Hall’s patriots would nominate a southern ticket.
The departed delegates’ very way of leaving Institute Hall hinted at a hope of coming back. On April 30, as they shuffled toward the exits, some “took position as spectators” briefly. After seeing no white flag waved, they completed their perhaps temporary departure. On the morrow, Military Hall became their observation tower, to see if Institute Hall’s remnant would succumb.
By refusing to finalize their retirement, the retirees opened the best window onto why they departed the Democracy—and what they had not expected to achieve, at the moment of departure. Most of them did not see themselves as striding toward a southern nation when they strode out of Institute Hall. They did not plot that their departure would automatically shatter the Democracy. They did not scheme in April for a Republican victory in November, much less for a disunionist triumph in December–January. They did not forge a disunionist conspiracy, deploying secret intrigues to savage the last national party. Instead, they worked in the open air to intensify their same old strategy: pressure Northern Democrats to yield proslavery concessions, continuing a quarter century of northern appeasements.
Accusations that departing delegates harbored premeditated disunionism, even conspiratorial disunionism, rang out at the time and reecho still. The Democracy’s shattering, after all, led straight to Lincoln’s election and on to disunion. The order of events delighted disunionists. Surely, one might assume, they intentionally did something to forge the first chain in a premeditated chain reaction. Surely, some of them even secretly conspired to bring off such a necessary first step.
But a result never proves an intention. Many human actions have unintended consequences—sometimes consequence at war with the intention. To read result backward into intention is to tell a tale that plows ahead of itself, obliterating the swirl of confusion in human attempts to struggle from one historical moment to the next. Hindsight particularly distorts events such as the collapse of the National Democratic Party, where attempts to intensify an old strategy help carry the strategists into a new strategic situation.
Before the Democracy’s convention, Yancey came closest to prophesying that Alabama’s ultimatum in Charleston would lead straight to disunion. He thought that intensified southern pressure would probably cause Northern Democrats to balk. In that eventuality, he believed that the most intransigent Southerners would depart the convention. But he saw other possible outcomes. Northern Democrats could succumb to the Davis “when necessary” limitation on Popular Sovereignty. Subsequent southern ultimatums could yield subsequent Yankee submissions and eventually, perhaps, even safety for the South in a reconstructed party and Union.
If, as Yancey thought more likely, Northern Democrats rejected southern demands, this time or after some future ultimatum, a Northern Republican might still lose the presidency. According to a plausible scenario, Northern Democrats could win just enough Yankee states, while Southern Democrats or Southern Oppositionists could capture all southern states. Then the election, stalemated in the Electoral College, would be thrust into the House of Representatives. The U.S. Constitution requires the House, when selecting a president, to vote by states. By taking advantage of that voting arrangement, the southern minority had controlled the Charleston convention’s platform committee.
Moreover, Northern Democrats in the House of Representatives might side with their former southern allies rather than with their Northern Republican foes. The Lower South delegates’ parade out of Institute Hall could thus plausibly end with a Southerner’s parade into the White House. From that position of presidential strength (and from Yancey’s hoped-for position in the U.S. Senate), more sweeping ultimatums for Yankee surrender could come. Eventually, Northerners would probably snap. If the South had been kept together throughout the ultimatum process, a united southern revolution would ensue.
Yancey sought to produce an age of ceaseless, relentless probing of northern resolve, with an immediate revolution only one possibility. He could accept Military Hall delegates’ preference for further probing, before forever leaving the Democracy (or the Union). He would patiently help perhaps temporarily departed folk with any reasonable ultimatum, so that they would help him after failed ultimatums made the need for permanent departure crystal clear. And neither he nor anyone else conspired to create the first departure.
The very absence of conspiracy measures the distance, nine months before disunion, between the party politicians who first shattered the Democracy and the South Carolina antiparty politicians who first shattered the Union (and, as we will see, found secret plots briefly helpful). The Lower South political operators who departed Institute Hall had dominated national politics for a quarter century. They had never needed or deployed secret conspiracies. They had always utilized classic nonconspiratorial tactics. Through pressure politics up front and behind the scenes, a determined minority had insisted that a less determined majority must yield concessions. Southern Democrats had squeezed gag rules, Texas annexation, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act out of Northern Democrats.
With the Alabama ultimatum in Institute Hall, Lower South Democrats had again turned up the heat on Northern Democrats. After that ultimatum failed, Lower South Democrats turned the heat still higher by leaving the premises. As their watchful waiting in Military Hall showed, they continued to deploy what turned out to be their last effort, inside the party, to salvage minority control of the Democracy (and thus of the nation) the nonconspiratorial way.
South Carolina leaders of imminent brief conspiracies had no impact on delegates in Institute Hall or Military Hall. All antiparty extremists sat out the event, making themselves powerless up in the galleries. Yancey, in turn, needed no conspiracy to command this season preliminary to disunion (and thus preliminary to fleeting disunion conspiracies). He only needed to give reasonable men reasonable time to discern whether a reasonably compromised ultimatum for “when necessary” would bring Yankees to their knees.
Supposedly (the evidence is sketchy) on the night before the convention voted between the Majority and Minority Platforms, Yancey met with prominent southern seekers of the party’s rescue, including U.S. Senator John Slidell of Louisiana. Allegedly, Yancey and fellow conferees sought to hammer out slightly more compromised language than “when necessary.” Supposedly, Yancey’s last-minute effort explored words that Northern Democrats would be slightly more willing to accept. Allegedly, Yancey tried to persuade his Alabama allies to pause until the final overture succeeded or failed.
A last-minute movement for a slightly less forbidding ultimatum to the North, if it ever existed, failed. Alabama’s delegates, if they ever heard of it, would not pause. Yancey, if he was ever involved, furthered just the reputation he desired (and that desire is the best reason to credit the sketchy evidence).6 The Alabamian always wanted to be seen as one disunion advocate who would give unionists every reasonable opportunity to succeed, so long as they supported tests of whether the Democracy or the Union should survive.
Even if Yancey did contemplate dropping back a trifle, the night before leaving Institute Hall, he assuredly opposed moving ahead even a trifle, once he sensed the mood in Military Hall.7 Having come so far so fast, he could wait until Military Hall’s observers had given up on the Institute Hall convention. Thus did Military Hall’s drama without conspiracy become a play without action, featuring a Lower South star passively waiting for Upper South brethren to decide whether to declare war on Northern Democrats. Meanwhile, South Carolina’s future disunionist conspirators denounced such foreign antics in their hometown. They especially deplored Yancey, that best ex–South Carolina fire-eater with the best South Carolina name, who stalled when the best South Carolina–style aggression could have (supposedly!) finalized the drama.
When nothing could be finalized about a presidential candidate in Institute Hall, except to try again in Baltimore, nothing beyond the platform plank could be decided on in Military Hall, except to wait and watch once more. Yancey’s rump conclave designated Richmond as its next perch for watchful waiting. The Military Hall rebels selected June 11, a week before the Baltimore convention would meet, as their date to reassemble.
As exhausted delegates from both halls limped to Charleston’s train station on May 3, they could scarcely bear the thought of struggling in and out of the cars another six times before Washington, D.C., would loom ahead. Amidst bedraggled conventioneers, only two winners had anything to celebrate. The Charleston stalemate had lifted William Lowndes Yancey out of the shadows, giving him an importance that a U.S. Senate post never bestowed on Benjamin Fitzpatrick. Then too, while making Yancey rich in notoriety, the paralyzed proceedings had made faro bankers rich in lucre. One new titan cleared $24,000 from the depleted crowd who had once ridden the Democracy to national power and fortune.
– 3 –
The Institute Hall conclave had asked Lower South states to fill their delegations’ vacancies, before the Democracy reconvened in Baltimore. In late May and early June, most Lower South Democratic Party state conventions reassembled to process the request. The Democracy’s state conventions had to decide whether to send delegates to the regathering of Institute Hall stalwarts in Baltimore, or to the reassembling of Military Hall rebels in Richmond, or to both new assemblages, or to neither fresh effort.
Robert Barnwell Rhett had scorned all Democratic Party conventions, state or national, for fifteen years. He now came back to one convention in order to keep the wrong South Carolinians out of another and to keep the Lower South out of yet another. Inside his state’s reconvened Democratic Party convention, he meant to arrange for only the right delegation (to wit, his own) to journey to only the right reconvened subsequent convention (to wit, Richmond’s) to achieve only the right result (to wit, no Lower South participation in Baltimore, least of all to test prospects for party reconstruction).
In the aftermath of the Charleston convention, the lowcountry gaggle of Rhetts, fiery secessionists down to the last cousin, could not fathom how something so rotten as the National Democracy, led by someone so dubious as Yancey, could fashion a road to disunion. Baltimore, itself on the edge of antislavery, could be just the place for the wrong leader to convey the wrong Southerners back into the party morass. Yancey, with his infernal tolerance for test after test of a quagmire already tested to exhaustion, could be just the blunderer to allow one test too many. If southern compromisers secured a party reconstruction in Baltimore, warned Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., “the whole movement is likely to prove a failure, the South demoralized, and Seward triumphant.”8
The Rhetts saw only one way past demoralization. Lower South delegates must nominate their candidate at the Richmond convention, thankfully scheduled to begin seven days before the Baltimore convention. Then the Richmond delegates must go home and give Baltimore nary a thought. To further that tactic, Rhett needed his own South Carolina delegation to replace the Orr supporters in Richmond.
James L. Orr and his followers resented Rhett’s attitude.9 They had, after all, retired from Institute Hall at Rhett’s behest. Now the ingrate pronounced them too compromising to serve the state. Worse, at the state Democratic Party convention, Rhett played his undemocratic trump card, the very one that the Orr supporters had long battled against, to bar the suspect uplanders as Richmond delegates. The lowcountry’s most famous disunionist claimed as many extra representatives in the Democratic Party’s state convention as the lowcountry possessed in the state legislature. With that boon, Rhett’s less populated lowcountry parishes dominated Orr’s more populated upcountry counties in the state convention. Rhett bullied through resolutions that sent his own slate of delegates (and not Orr’s) to Richmond (and not to Baltimore).10
Rhett thus hammered a second nail in Orr’s political coffin, the pressure to secede from the Institute Hall convention having fashioned the first. When Orrites met this second mugging in a month with only impotent mutterings, they appeared even less likely to stand firm against a subsequent rush to disunion. Rhett seemed to have South Carolina almost unprotestingly under his heel. Could he now use the Richmond convention to crush any Lower South (or Yancey) inclination to travel to Baltimore, to make one last stab at party reconstruction?
Rhett would fail if Mississippi’s delegates had their way. Mississippi’s state Democratic Party convention unanimously sent the same delegates who had followed Alabamians out of Institute Hall first to Richmond (on June 11), then to Baltimore (on June 18). After tolerating Rhett in Richmond, Mississippi’s delegates planned to march on Baltimore, to determine finally whether the National Democracy could be reconstructed.
Powhattan Ellis, Sr., an important Mississippi judge, privately explained why Lower South Democrats beyond South Carolina meant to give Northern Democrats one last chance. If the Baltimore convention “will give us a platform recognizing our own rights and equality,” wrote Judge Ellis, “we shall be ready and willing to join them in making a nomination.” Douglas is too compromised to receive such a nomination, and Lincoln is too unknown to win the presidency. So if the Northern Democracy will relent, “the political chessboard presents a favorable aspect.”
But if the Northern Democracy throws away its final chance “to join us on fair & equal terms,” continued Ellis, and “if the flag of our country cannot protect me and my property wherever it can be rightfully raised,” we must “seek safety in our own strong arms.” While “many timid and wavering men … view opposition to the government as dreadful,” Judge Ellis entertained “no such apprehensions. Even if I did, it is better we should encounter the struggle now, than postpone it to a future period when our opponents will be comparatively much stronger.”11
Yancey cherished the Mississippi attitude that Judge Ellis articulated. He found the same attitude in Alabama Democrats’ state convention. He had built his Institute Hall strategy on an Alabama ultimatum worded to suit the Mississippians. He could hardly now repudiate a two-state collaboration that was demonstrably pulling both states toward Rhett, just because Rhett distrusted their last attempt to discern whether the National Democracy remained unreconstructable. So Yancey helped rally most Alabama Democrats to send their Charleston delegation first to Richmond, then to Baltimore—and to insist again on the Alabama ultimatum in Baltimore before deciding whether to return to Richmond.
Not only Rhett but also the few Alabama Douglasites shuddered at the prospect of Yancey marching on Baltimore. Like all other Lower South Douglas supporters and like Missouri’s Austin King, they saw no present necessity to insist on congressional protection of slavery in the territories, whatever the future necessities. They saw every immediate necessity to rout the Northern Republican insistence on congressional emancipation in the territories. Only Douglas might defeat the Republicans’ presidential candidate in the North. Lower South pragmatists should thus rally behind the best available Northerner. Southern Douglasites could wait to rally for the best southern principle until it was, to use Jefferson Davis’s word, “necessary.”
The logic compelled Alabama’s Douglas advocates to call their own irregular state Democratic Party convention. While only twenty-eight of fiftytwo Alabama counties sent delegates, this sliver of Democrats appointed a pro-Douglas slate of representatives to Baltimore (and not to Richmond). Simultaneously, an equally rump Louisiana state Democratic Party convention, with only twenty of thirty-nine counties represented, dispatched another irregular pro-Douglas delegation to only Baltimore.
In Georgia, Douglas’s followers suffered routs by four-to-one and sevento-one margins in the state Democracy’s regular convention. The losers then convened by themselves. This Georgia rump body appointed yet more pro-Douglas delegates to Baltimore alone. So did Arkansas Douglas supporters.
Thus among the eight Cotton South states, only Florida and South Carolina accredited delegates for solely Richmond. The six other regular Democratic Party state conventions sent their old Institute Hall delegations to both Richmond and Baltimore. Only the four irregular state conventions sent new pro-Douglas representatives to Baltimore alone. In Richmond, all the non–South Carolina seceders from Institute Hall would confront Rhett’s futile determination to keep them away from Baltimore. In Baltimore, the former Military Hall rebels would face challenges for convention seats from small Douglas minorities of four states’ Democrats.
In Richmond, as expected, Rhett begged the Military Hall delegates to forget Baltimore and the Democracy. But after two days of listening to South Carolinians, all the other delegates followed Yancey toward Baltimore and one more effort to reconstruct the National Democracy. Even the Floridians, accredited only to the Richmond convention, preferred observing up in Baltimore to keeping Rhett company down in Virginia.
Rhett and his South Carolina slate suffered grave forebodings that Yancey would be “paralyzed,” as Rhett’s son put it, up in the neutral borderland. The same “want of nerve” and “want of leadership” that Yancey had supposedly displayed in Military Hall, glowered Rhett Jr., might again abort a permanent party split.12 To which Yancey would have answered, I will again save you from yourselves.
– 4 –
And so the mellow charmer did, with the ironic help of Douglas’s scowling northern supporters. Yancey himself became the special object of Yankee rage. That sweet killer, having murdered Douglas’s hopes in Charleston, now dared come back to kill again, with that same charming smile on his face. Northern Democrats could reseat some of the Military Hall crowd. They could especially tolerate the Georgians, who had accepted departure from Institute Hall so hard. But Yancey!
As Northern Democrats saw their predicament, their previous willingness to help southern allies had almost annihilated the Northern Democracy. After Republicans’ derision about slaves of the Slave Power, Northern Democrats’ seats in Congress had dwindled toward zero. In 1852, before the Kansas struggles, Northern Democrats had possessed ninety-two congressional votes, compared to Southern Democrats’ sixty-seven. Now, the Kansas turmoil had helped reduce the count to a dismal thirty-two for Northern Democrats, sixtynine for Southern Democrats.13
Stephen A. Douglas’s presidential prospects offered Northern Democrats their only apparent escape from this slide into political oblivion. The Little Giant had lately turned back Lincoln in Illinois. In the Lecompton affair, he had demonstrated that Popular Sovereignty could turn back slave expansion, so long as Congress insisted that the true settler majority must prevail. To that possibility of being seen in the North as the candidate who could free the territories (without ever decrying slavery), Douglas added the certainty of being seen as the racist candidate (for he ever decried blacks). If the South would allow him to be the national candidate, with a vaguely Popular Sovereignty platform accepted in all regions, he might defeat Lincoln more thoroughly than in 1858.
While Douglas supporters saw partisan possibilities if the South would accept a milk-toast platform and a Douglas nomination, they foresaw partisan disaster if the Northern Democracy again knuckled under to the Slave Power. Yancey’s minority meant to rule the convention or depart. How could democracy function when citizens voted and then the losers seceded from the winners’ government? This concern, so similar to Abraham Lincoln’s (and James Buchanan’s) imminent reaction to disunion, demonstrated how widely Northerners in 1860 conceived that the Slave Power, to protect black slavery from white democracy, had finally encroached too outrageously on white men’s majority rule.
Yankees marveled at southern gall in the face of the universal northern cry of enough already. Douglasites ranted that “after all the battles we have fought for the South—to be served in this manner—it is ungrateful and mean!” They only wish “to rule or ruin us!” Indeed, “he would be less than a man who would submit to them.” We must not “think of receding” an inch before “Disunion bullying and braggadocio” or “we shall be swept from the entire Midwest.” “‘Douglas or nobody’ is our motto,” and “any other alternative will prove our utter defeat and demoralization.”14
It felt to Douglas supporters ever so “sweet” at last to demonstrate that they “were not doughfaces,” that “the South was never before so well matched in her own game of brag and intolerable arrogance,” that Southerners who “had been ruling over niggers so long” could not “rule white men just the same.”15 Reseat William Lowndes Yancey in a white man’s democratic convention? The Democracy must instead bar him and his despotic blackmailers from Popular Sovereignty’s temple.
Northern Democrats’ outrage, together with Lower South Democrats’ fury, doomed the Democracy’s Baltimore convention before brawls over the platform and the candidate could even resume. First, the convention had to decide whether to admit the old Institute Hall seceders or the new Douglas supporters as delegates from Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Arkansas. Most Northern Democrats turned apoplectic at the vision of Yancey or his lieutenants performing inside the Front Street Theater, site of the national party’s resumed deliberations. Most Southern Democrats became stormy at the prospect of southern Douglas partisans, overwhelmingly rejected by Lower South voters, replacing Institute Hall seceders, massively reaffirmed by their constituents.
With a stalemate over which Lower South delegates to seat now adding to the Democracy’s paralysis, Stephen A. Douglas wrote two statesmanlike letters to important northern delegates. Douglas offered to withdraw his candidacy if his men in Baltimore thought that another Democrat could better unite the party on pure Popular Sovereignty principles. Douglas’s two lieutenants rightly pocketed these conditional letters of resignation. They knew that no other candidate could bring the Lower South around to pure Popular Sovereignty. Or as Yancey expressed southern intransigence, “the friends of Douglas … were ostrich-like—their head was in the sand of squatter sovereignty, and they did not know their great, ugly, ragged abolition body was exposed.”16
Yancey’s own ugly image persisted. A savage brawler, Yankee delegates stormed, still remained under the cover of the Alabamian’s amiable smile and mellow drawl. While Southerners considered Douglas the great Yankee pretender, Northerners thought that no pretense could beat Yancey’s sickening southern sweetness. The great ugly ragged ostriches, alias Northern Democrats, could hardly readmit the great ugly shaming revolutionary (alias Yancey), who, if allowed inside the Front Street Theater, would multiply his insults and ensure that the two-thirds rule would destroy Douglas. Northern Douglasites instead meant to dispatch Yancey and his outrages back to Richmond. Yankees would seat anti-Yancey, pro-Douglas Lower South delegates and nominate the Little Giant, their only potential savior.
Twenty-four hours before Douglas supporters announced their decision, the platform holding the convention’s orchestra crashed. After discovering that only a few settees suffered bodily damage, ghoulish jokesters proclaimed that the party suffered from a physically no less than an ideologically shaky platform. The next day, June 21, the fourth day of the Baltimore convention, dark comedy gave way to national tragedy. The convention voted 150-100½ to seat the Alabama and Louisiana Douglasites and to split Arkansas’s and Georgia’s votes between the former Institute Hall and new Douglas delegations. The convention majority quickly reversed itself on the Georgians’ credentials. The old Institute Hall delegation received back all the state’s votes in the Front Street Theater. But no reversal could shake Yankee determination to heave the supposedly bad apples from Alabama and Louisiana back south toward Richmond, where they could harmlessly rot.17
After the clerk announced that the former Institute Hall Alabama and Louisiana delegates could not reclaim convention seats, angry Virginians announced that this time the Cotton South would not leave alone. Over half the Border South and almost all the Middle South delegates marched out of the Front Street Theater behind Old Dominion gentlemen. These departing Upper South delegates quit the Yankees not just over the Freeport Doctrine and over Douglas but also over the late vote’s supposed trashing of majoritarian rules. The party required that a two-thirds majority of delegates, each representing his state’s majority, must concur on a presidential nominee.
Now, Douglas supporters would stuff the ballot box. They would brush aside the two-thirds barrier by seating Alabama and Louisiana delegates, none of them representative of the two states’ majority of settlers. Some victory for settler sovereignty that Douglas nomination would be! In addition to all other issues that seemed beyond compromise, the Democracy now faced an irrepressible conflict over who gutted white democracy most outrageously. Must the prize be given to Northerners who defied Alabama and Louisiana majorities? Or were Southerners who defied the national convention majority the worse sinners?18
– 5 –
The supposed southern sinners’ parade out of Baltimore’s Front Street Theater would imminently prove to have been yet another rehearsal for disunion. During the breakup of the Union as during the breakup of the Democracy, the Upper South would initially reject departure. On both occasions, the Middle South would eventually join the Lower South, but only after Yankees combated the first departure with a supposed violation of white men’s democratic rights. On both occasions, many borderland Southerners would scorn both waves of departures. On both occasions, participants in the first departure would include reconstructionists, hopeful that temporary secession would force a reformed policy. But the next time, Rhett and fellow unconditional disunionists would abort any try for reconstruction.
Although Rhett never saw why, Yancey, by accompanying would-be reconstructionists to Baltimore, proved again that his tactics perfectly fit the April–June presecession situation. Before the Democracy crashed, few Lower South Democrats favored disunion, unless and until their old National Democratic Party lifeline proved to be hopeless. By eternally moving back with reasonable men to perform reasonable tests of the lifeline, Yancey rallied numbers of followers beyond his fondest expectations to move forward with him, when the lifeline proved to be frayed beyond any reconstructive effort. After starting as a largely scorned extremist, he ended up leading not only Lower South Democrats (whom he coveted) but also most Upper South Democrats (whom he distrusted). Secession itself would ultimately draw a lower percentage of Southerners out of the Union than Yancey’s tactics helped draw out of the National Democracy.
– 6 –
Back inside the denationalized National Democracy’s depopulated Front Street Theater, Douglas supporters savored their emancipation from the Slave Power. On the second presidential roll call, the freedmen declared Stephen A. Douglas nominated unanimously (even though his vote on the last tally still fell slightly short of two-thirds of the original delegates).19 Meanwhile, the southern delegates who renounced the Front Street Theater (plus six northern delegates) marched not down to Richmond but over to another Baltimore hall. Their meeting place bore quite the name: Institute Hall!
In this latest Institute Hall (this time Maryland Institute Hall), 105 delegates gathered, all of them once delegates in Charleston’s Institute Hall. The congregants totaled over twice as many delegates as had peopled Charleston’s Military Hall. On June 23, this expanded rump convention (and not the contracted Richmond convention) first chose U.S. Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as its presidential nominee on its first ballot, with well over two-thirds of the votes.20
During their single-day convention, Maryland Institute Hall’s celebrants also endorsed the Charleston platform committee’s Majority Report. John C. Breckinridge would seek the presidency under the banner that Congress must protect slavery in U.S. territories, not immediately but only if and when later necessary. This diluted imperative for congressional territorial protection, Jefferson Davis’s compromised creation, thus routed Albert Gallatin Brown’s uncompromising national congressional slave code for the fourth time in 1860: first in the Yancey-led Alabama state Democratic convention in January, then in Charleston’s Institute Hall’s platform committee in April, then in the U.S. Senate in May, finally in Maryland Institute Hall in June.
Southern decisions in the latest Institute Hall left poor Rhett the more stranded in Richmond. He remained over 150 miles from southern seceders. His lonely plight had never more resembled the forlornness of Yancey in 1848, with only one seceder from the Democracy trailing behind him, or of Albert Gallatin Brown in early 1860, with only one senator voting for his immediate slave code, or of that Lone Rangeress pictured above the stage in Charleston’s Institute Hall, stabbing at everyone with a bowie knife, cutting no one.
Some of Breckinridge’s Lower South selectors mercifully stopped off in Richmond on their way home, to help Rhett save what was left of face. Middle South delegates showed Rhett no such mercy, even though he fretted on Virginia terrain. Only one Virginian and one North Carolinian joined fortysix Lower South delegates back in Richmond. On June 26, this most rump of all the 1860 conventions, containing under half of the Maryland Institute Hall delegates, rubber-stamped what the Baltimore seceders had accomplished three days before: John C. Breckinridge’s nomination and the “when necessary” territorial platform.21 It was a fitting finale for a giant step toward disunion that the subsequently crucial South Carolina disunionists had done nothing to accomplish.