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The last stand of the Upper South’s Whig Party often has been overlooked. In 1859, five years after the national party disappeared, Whigs in the Upper South organized an “Opposition Party”—opposed, that is, to the Democratic Party. Most members of the so-called Southern Opposition were eager to damp down North-South acrimony. They looked askance at Southern Rights Democrats, who fanned Southern insecurities and attempted to capitalize on them. A possible counterweight to forces that soon would wreck the Union, the Southern Opposition came close to changing the partisan balance in the Upper South.1 A small group of ex-Whigs from the Upper South joined with Northern Democrats and Republicans in early 1858 to defeat the Lecompton Constitution , which would have made entry of the Kansas Territory into the Union contingent upon defining its status as a slave state. Anti-Lecompton Southerners thereby rejected demands by Southern Democrats for regional solidarity on a slavery-related matter. By killing Lecompton, its opponents resolved the disruptive Kansas issue and assured that Kansas ultimately would enter the Union as a free state. And with no other territory owned by the United States holding any promise for plantation slavery, the Upper South’s persistent Whigs thought they spotted an opening. They aspired to regain power in the Upper South—and perhaps to build a national party—by distancing themselves from both Southern proslavery absolutists and Northern antislavery hard-liners. Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden, heir to the mantle of Henry Clay and a fixture on the national stage for four decades, repudiated President James Buchanan’s administration not only for trying to drive through Lecompton but also for its extravagance, its corruption, and its inability to maintain prosperity. Crittenden attempted to reach across NorthSouth sectional lines by emphasizing issues that all opponents of the administration could agree upon. He hoped that the sharp economic downturn of The Southern Opposition and the Crisis of the Union Daniel W. Crofts 86 Daniel W. Crofts 1857–58 would prompt voters to give priority to tangible pocketbook issues rather than abstract disagreements regarding the future of slavery.2 The diminished profile of the Kansas issue after mid-1858 endangered the Republican Party. It had formed between 1854 and 1856, and had carried a majority of free states in the 1856 presidential election, by challenging proslavery excesses in Kansas and by opposing the spread of slavery to any other territories. In 1858 and 1859 prominent Republicans feared that antislavery sentiment was ebbing. They worried that the Republican organization might be absorbed by a “polyglot opposition party” and consigned “to an early grave.” Between late 1858 and early 1860, the historian Michael F. Holt concluded, the threat of an opposition party confronted the Republican Party with “its sternest challenge.”3 Holt was not the first to ponder the possibilities for a new national party led by ex-Whigs from the Upper South. The historian Allan Nevins considered the rise of the Southern Opposition a key juncture in the history of the era. In his view, it might have checked the growth of “fanaticism and disruption ” while inaugurating “long-overdue attention to internal reform and development.” Rather than continuing the barren quarrel over slavery in the territories, the Opposition would have promoted economic policies that had bisectional appeal—”more railways, more canals, better seaports and river ports, a fairer tax system, and free public schools.” In retrospect, the Upper South’s readiness to consider “moderation and reconciliation” rather than North-South polarization offered a “last hope of adjustment.”4 This essay first explains why the Southern Opposition emerged where it did—in the Upper South. Second, the core of this essay addresses the haunting might-have-beens that hover about the Southern Opposition’s brief history —how its rise stirred discussion about a united opposition that might have given shape to the slippery middle between Southern Democrats and hard-line Republicans. Finally, this essay briefly considers the interconnection between partisan politics in the Upper South in the late 1850s and the startling insurgency against secession that briefly took hold there after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in November 1860. Let us begin with an overview of two-party politics in the late antebellum South. Our understanding of the political crisis that led to war emphasizes the South’s attachment to—and domination of—the Democratic Party. By 1860 the free states outnumbered the slave states eighteen to fifteen, and the population gap was larger, approximately twenty...

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