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Chapter Eight THE MORTAL ENEMY OF THE SOUTH Southern rights editors and politicians largely ignored the mounting evidence that the Texas Troubles had been greatly exaggerated by false rumors of arson and poisonings, which had been enhanced and made more believable by the fraudulent Bailey letter. As the presidential election loomed nearer, those who refused even to consider accepting a Republican president stepped up the intensity of their attacks on Abraham Lincoln. They reiterated the stories of arson and poisonings and repeated the charges made earlier by Breckinridge supporters that Lincoln’s party had been responsible. The attacks directed at Lincoln became increasingly personal and vicious. Secessionists not only depicted the Illinois Republican as the enemy of slavery, but also as a man who would not hesitate to encourage the slaughter of innocent whites. As proof, they cited the alleged Republican support of the Mystic Red’s depredations in the Lone Star State. This tactic forced the friends of the Union in the South to assume a defensiveness that they were never able to overcome . When unionists tried to minimize the danger that a Republican administration would pose to slavery, the secessionists accused them of disloyalty to the South, alleging that by advocating “submission” to a “Black Republican” administration they were, in effect, expressing a willingness to subject their families, and the families of all southerners, to all the horrors of the Texas Troubles. The slave panic could not have come at a worse time for those who loved the Union, or at a better time for those who wished to destroy it. The secessionists’ skillful use of the Texas Troubles in effect robbed the Unionists of their most effective argument and helped them seize the initiative in the battle for the hearts and minds of southerners. Most southerners had long equated Republican free- 68 soilism with abolitionism; nevertheless, the northern party’s opposition to slavery ’s expansion and its supposed ambition to abolish the peculiar institution in the southern states hardly posed an immediate threat to the average white person in the South. Unionist papers repeatedly pointed out that the Republicans almost certainly would fail to win control of both houses of Congress; moreover, the Supreme Court, which likely would have a decidedly Democratic majority for years to come, would block any efforts to strike a blow at slavery. Since Lincoln, as president, would be unable to abolish slavery, even if he so desired , the South should be willing to accept his election and give him a chance to show that he would treat the slaveholding states fairly. If he were to commit an “overt act” against the South’s constitutional rights, there would be plenty of time for the slave states to join together and secede cooperatively, as a unit.1 The fire-eaters knew that the “cooperationist” approach was a sure formula for defeating their dream of a southern confederacy. They had traveled that road in 849–850, only to see their hopes dashed when the Nashville Convention failed to create southern solidarity. It was essential from the secessionists’ point of view that one or more of the more radical slave states of the Lower South act unilaterally to leave the Union. Such a bold step would undoubtedly lead to a confrontation with the federal government, which in turn would force the more timid slave states to support the state (or states) that had seceded . William Lowndes Yancey, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and other like-minded radicals worked out this strategy at the Southern Commercial Convention that convened at Montgomery, Alabama, on May 0, 858. Although they admitted that the southern people as a whole were unready for secession, the Montgomery radicals were hardly discouraged, for they recognized that revolutions are instigated by small groups of dedicated men, not by the masses.2 A few weeks after the convention finished its work, Yancey summed up the new strategy in a letter to James S. Slaughter of Atlanta. Secessionists should emulate their revolutionary forefathers, he said, by forming “committees of public safety” all over the Deep South. Yancey was convinced that through the activities of such small cadres “we shall fire the Southern heart—instruct the Southern mind—give courage to each other, and at the proper moment, by organized concerted action, we can precipitate the Cotton States into a revolution.”3 . Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 848–86 (Baton Rouge, La., 953), 350–35. 2. Laura A. White, Robert Barnwell Rhett: Father...

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