Lincoln and the Civil War

1. The Election of 1860 and Southern Secession

11 c h a p t e r o n e the election of 1860 and southern secession Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election, which precipitated the Civil War, was both a referendum on slavery and a repudiation of the corrupt administrations of Democratic Presidents Franklin Pierce (1853–57) and James Buchanan (1857–61). Shortly after his electoral triumph, Lincoln said, “I have been elected mainly on the cry ‘Honest Old Abe.’”1 Abundant evidence suggests that he was right. Voters’ desire for honesty in government played a key role at the polls in November. The public was fed up with steamship lobbies, land-grant bribery, hireling journalists, the spoils system, rigged political conventions , and cost overruns on government projects. Buchanan and Pierce had offended the electorate by tolerating such abuses of power. To punish the Democrats, citizens decided to throw the rascals out and elect Lincoln, not so much because he championed the antislavery cause but rather because he was perceived to be a man of integrity. Many voters shared Indiana Congressman David Kilgore’s desire “to see this God forsaken Hell deserving set of corrupt politicians turned out of office, and honest men put in their places.”2 Among those voters was a New Englander who explained, “Multitudes of us voted the republican ticket because we wanted honesty to displace corruption.”3 Another was the New York economist David A. Wells: “I voted for Mr. Lincoln, not because I hated slavery, or thought it a sin, or wished in any way to do my neighbor a wrong,—but because I was disgusted with the present Administration, & wished for a 12 | the election of 1860 and southern secession change.”4 In Rhode Island, a Democrat concluded that Republican success “is not owing to anti-slavery; it is owing to the failure of the Democratic federal administration,—a failure caused by corruption and one-sidedness and an ultra pro-slavery policy.” He added that if Buchanan had “been honest and able, the Republicans would have been badly beaten.”5 Horace Greeley, editor of the most influential Northern Republican newspaper, the New York Tribune, doubted that many Northerners hated slavery on moral grounds and insisted that they desired above all things “a Radical reform in the patronage and expenditures of the Government.”6 On election eve, the New York World remarked that many thousand “intelligent men support the candidates of the republican party, not that they care a broken tobacco-pipe for the negro question, but because they see no other way to honest management at Washington. They believe that the democratic party has been so long in power that it has become corrupt; that it understands too well the crooked arts by which partizan pockets are lined at the public expense; and that it is safer to try an experiment with new men and a young party, than to continue a set of old party hacks at the public crib. If Mr. Lincoln’s administration shall prove honest, economical and tranquillizing, they will be quite satisfied, though he should never once allude to free soil in any of his annual messages.”7 Many Southerners, however, did not view Lincoln’s election as a routine exercise in turning out corrupt rascals. Instead, they perceived the Republican standard bearer as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a John Brown–style radical abolitionist who pretended to be only a moderate opponent of slavery expansion. They did not believe his protestations that he would not touch slavery where it existed. His famous 1858 House Divided address they interpreted as a call for war against the South. They were alarmed by another speech he gave that year in which he declared: “let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. . . . Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”8 Such egalitarian rhetoric affronted the millions the election of 1860 and southern secession | 13 of Southerners whose devotion to white supremacy formed the core of their identity. When assured that Lincoln was a moderate Republican who would leave slavery intact in the fifteen states where it already existed , Southerners replied that his election foreshadowed the doom of slavery...