Politics, Personalities, Principles: The Union Disintegrates, 1860

After a year of political anarchy, American voters elevated Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860. In the interval between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration four months later, disunion sentiment roiled the slave states. Before the year’s end, South Carolina voted for secession with colors flying. Two weeks later, Georgia elected representatives to its own secession convention. Polk County chose a local notable, Judge Abner Darden, to represent the citizens who lived around Rome, the county seat. This old-line Whig, friend and associate of Alexander H. Stephens, attended that conference with the profoundest anxieties. Family records memorialize him pacing the corridors and wringing his hands over the horror of disunion and the danger of an apocalyptic civil war. He had no other opportunity to dissent. Despite the judge’s forebodings, the Georgia delegates voted with almost as much enthusiasm as the South Carolinians to leave the union on January 16. The Georgians’ decision pointed the way to the disaster of the brothers’ war to come even as it helped culminate the political disorders that had wracked the nation for a decade. In Year of Meteors, Douglas R. Egerton examines the electoral politics of 1860 as a means of understanding the political events that precipitated the war.

Although Egerton focuses on 1860 as “the year of meteors” (from a poem in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), his chronology runs before and after that election year. The first chapter details background events of the 1850s. The next five take on the meteor year itself. Chapter two details the disastrous Democratic convention in Charleston in April, the third chapter covers the organizational movements of the Constitutional Union and Liberty parties. The fourth examines the Republicans’ convention. The multiple reconvening of the splintered Democracy in Richmond and Baltimore forms the fifth; the sixth is on the campaign itself. The final three chapters push the chronology into 1861 and the consequences of the election: the secession movement in the lower South, the formation of the Confederate government, and the selection of cabinets in Montgomery and Washington.

Egerton has produced a lively, traditional monograph. He writes old-fashioned political history—partisan maneuvering, voting blocs, campaign managers, and canvassing. Equally traditional, the author studies events through biography. Not least, he has produced a traditional narrative—like biography and political history, a form that postmodernism and social theory have virtually eliminated from the academy. The subject and form should both guarantee a popular audience. It should appeal to academics, as well, despite the paucity of new interpretation and some problems with bibliography, notes, and sources. With its emphasis on racism, racial motives, class conflict, and conspiratorial definitions of the Southern planter class, the text confirms the most current academic biases and political values in American intellectual, academic culture today. It is also useful, perhaps, even in ways the author did not imagine. In the face of Egerton’s predispositions toward the data and even his own narrative, the text offers contradictions and paradoxes that illuminate fundamental issues in the secession crisis and American politics in the wake of abolitionism.

Egerton’s subtitle emphasizes Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, but Douglas gets the more extended treatment. Although “The Little Giant” begins and ends this narrative, Douglas makes an odd hero in Egerton’s handling. The author blames him from the outset, for example, for the whole political mess that preceded the war. Thus, he writes: “Rarely has a single politician helped produce such national chaos” (p. 50). The text also paints him almost as a grotesque: a raving drunk, violent rhetorician, and self-serving apologist for capitalist and national expansion. More to the point, he condemns Douglas as an intemperate white racist. Just so, Egerton charges him with moral opprobrium in the failure to distinguish the radicalism of the abolitionists from the excesses of the Fire-eaters. For Egerton, this rejection of the Garrisonians’ moral, political, and even historical legitimacy...