Coming Fury, Volume 1 (2 page)

Mr. Yancey could usually be found at the Charleston Hotel, where the anti-Douglas forces were gathering, and a Northerner who went around to have a look at him reported that he was unexpectedly quiet and mild-mannered: as bland and as smooth as Fernando Wood, the silky Democratic boss from New York City, but radiating a general air of sincerity that Wood never had. No one, seeing Yancey in a room full of politicians, would pick him out as the one most likely to pull the cotton states into a revolution. He was compact and muscular, “with a square-built head and face, and an eye full of expression,” a famous orator who scorned the usual tricks of oratory and spoke in an easy conversational style; he was said to have in his system a full three-hour speech against the Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, to be unloaded at the proper time, and the Northern observer reflected uneasily that although Douglas probably had most of the votes at this convention, the opposition might be a little ahead in brains.
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William Lowndes Yancey was worth anybody’s study. The Democratic party was convening in Charleston, South Carolina, in late April of 1860, to nominate a candidate for the presidency, and the future of the country perhaps depended on the way the convention acted. The delegates might look for a safe middle ground, and (finding what they sought) work out some sort of compromise that would avert a split in party and nation; or they might listen to the extremists, scorn the middle ground, and commit all of America to a dramatic leap into the dark. Yancey, who was called
the Prince of Fire-Eaters, was ready for such a leap. This convention would indulge in no compromise if he could help it.

There was no secret about what Yancey wanted. More than a decade earlier he had denounced “the foul spell of party which binds and divides and distracts the South,” and had proclaimed the hope that someone would eventually break it—a task to which he was now devoting himself. He had asked his fellow Southerners whether “we have any hope of righting ourselves and doing justice to ourselves in the Union”; answering his question in the negative, he had said that he would work with those who did hope in the belief that eventually they would discover that nothing but secession would do.
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There was nobody quite like Yancey, and yet he was somehow typical: one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850s (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but who could not do anything more than that. The mildness of his manner was deceptive; he had once had a great fight with his wife’s uncle and, in self-defense, had killed the man (a thing which proper Charlestonians still remembered), and while in Congress he had fought a famous although bloodless duel with a fellow Southerner. In his youth he had briefly brushed elbows with the crusading anti-slavery spirit which he now hated above all other things. Born in Georgia in 1814, he had been taken north while still a child when his widowed mother married a Presbyterian minister and moved to Troy, New York; and in this stepfather’s church, in 1826, Charles Grandison Finney had preached at the beginning of the great revivalist campaign which was to spread abolitionism like a virulent infection (as Yancey would have said) all across the Middle West. Close friends of the stepfather, too, were such antislavery men as Theodore Weld and Lewis Tappan. None of this touched Yancey, however. He moved south, fell under the spell of John C. Calhoun, entered law, politics, and planter society (he married a rich planter’s daughter), and in the mid-1840s entered Congress, where his first speech was an impassioned denial that Calhoun wanted or worked for disunion and an independent Southern Confederacy. What he disavowed for Calhoun, however, he presently accepted for himself; a great orator in a land that loved to listen to speeches, he eventually found in slave-state extremism a base to
which his oratory could be solidly anchored. Over the years he had developed into the most fluent and persuasive of fire-eaters.
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Now he was busy among the delegates who were arriving for the convention. A disturbing sign, if any of Senator Douglas’s men had noticed it, was the presence in the same hotel of Senator John Slidell, of Louisiana, who one day would make a famous trip to France; a hard-working, resolute man with thinning white hair over a cherry-red face, one who apparently enjoyed good health and good living; accepted here as spokesman and chief hatchet man for the administration of President James Buchanan, very busy among delegates from the deep South. It was whispered that Slidell ran the President—Buchanan, it was told, was “as wax in his fingers”—and though Buchanan had explicitly refused to seek or even to accept a renomination, he was deeply determined that the nomination should not go to Senator Douglas.
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Until the convention actually opened, the combinations and hazards and deeply laid schemes would be only partly visible. Yet during the last days before the convention opened—the chairman was to call the delegates to order on April 23—there hung in the air a sense that events here might not go according to routine. The mere fact that the delegates were meeting in Charleston, rather than in some other city, seemed to make a difference, and as the steamboats came up the harbor to the water front, the delegates from Northern states lined the rails to look about them with eager curiosity. For a generation, Charleston had been a symbol; now it was reality, seen for the first time, its horizons lost in the blue haze of wooded lowlands that enclosed the broad sparkling bay.

At first glance it looked familiar enough, a quiet American city of 40,000 people spread out on a flat peninsula between two rivers to face the sea, its slim white church spires seeming all the taller because land and houses all lay so close to the water level. Yet there was a strangeness here, as if Charleston were a stage set designed to remind outlanders that along this coast which had been stained by so much history, life had found a pattern unlike that which the rest of America knew. The shops seemed unexpectedly quaint, almost foreign, there were long rows of dwellings where delicate iron filigree of gateway and railing was outlined against pastel plasterwork, and there were mansions whose long piazzas
with slim white pillars looked inward toward shaded courtyards, as if the people who owned and controlled this land proposed to remain aloof. There were palmettos in the streets, unfamiliar blossoms topped the garden walls and gleamed in the half-hidden lawns, and in the park along the Battery the twisted live oaks were dripping with Spanish moss. On the wharves there were crowds of wide-eyed colored folk, kept in order by “ferocious-looking policemen, mounted on rickety nags, wearing huge spurs, swords and old-fashioned pistols.” The coaches and omnibuses that clattered down to the docks moved with a negligent, leisurely haste.

Early arrivals had time to make brief explorations, and most of them, no doubt, would have agreed with the Northerner who wrote that he was impressed by Charleston’s “singular beauties.” The most charming spot was the Battery, where upper-class folk rode disdainfully by in their carriages, and where one could see the town houses of wealthy planters, with columned streets going past toward the business center. Seaward there was Castle Pinckney on its low island, with Fort Sumter lying beyond at the gateway to the sea—Fort Sumter, an unfinished reality now, not yet an earth-moving abstraction, with a few workmen unhurriedly putting together bricks and stones in deep casemates; a place no one needed to give a second glance. Parts of Charleston looked almost French, for there was a strong Huguenot tradition here; other parts might have come straight from Georgian England, and like the English, the people of Charleston chose to follow certain picturesque customs from the old days. When an official proclamation was to be made, for instance, the sheriff in uniform and cocked hat would ride slowly down the street in an open carriage, with fife and drum to play him along and announce his magnificence, and he would stop at street corners to arise and read the proclamation at the top of his voice. Drums beat retreat at night and reveille in the morning to warn Negroes that they must be off the street during the hours of darkness unless their owners had provided them with tickets of leave.

This last point was of special interest to the men from the North. As Democrats, they were friendly to slavery (or at least they were willing to get along with it), but they rarely saw anything of it at first hand, and they knew very little about it, and one
of the things an early arrival could do was see for himself what Negroes living in bondage were actually like.

The yoke seemed to be rather light in these parts. A newspaper correspondent from New York felt it his duty to attend services in a Negro church. Politely patronizing, he noted the strange folk who made up the congregation, the white-haired old men, the women in their turbans, the gay colors in all of the clothing, not overlooking “the flashily-dressed, coquettish-looking younger women”; and he was so moved by the singing that when the minister lined out the first words of a hymn—“Blow ye the trumpet, blow”—he confessed that he and all the other visitors joined in with enthusiasm, so that “if we didn’t blow that trumpet then no trumpet was ever blown.” He reported that many Northern visitors went to near-by plantations, where they poked about in the slave quarters, admired the white teeth of the girls and the tumbling and crawling of wide-eyed infants, and absorbed such impressions as twenty minutes would give them of the peculiar institution on its own ground. Their impressions were not unfavorable: “The darkies, so far as I have seen, both house servants and field hands, seem greatly attached to their masters and are apparently contented and happy.” He added cautiously: “Whether that is anything in favor of the system or not is a question.”
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Most of the delegates had already formed their opinions about the system. It was not properly a subject for debate here, because the Democratic party (whose orators liked to refer to it as the One and Indivisible Democracy) was supposed to be a unit on the question. The unity was partly a matter of tradition; in this party, and in this party alone, men of the North and men of the South could find a common rallying ground, not too greatly vexed by the rising agitation of the slavery issue. Partly, too, the unity came from external pressure, applied chiefly by the new Republican party of the North. The Republicans were hostile to slavery, and this spring they seemed very likely to nominate Senator William H. Seward, of New York, who had spoken darkly of an irrepressible conflict and whose election, if it should come to pass, might readily bring that conflict into being. The Democracy’s task here was to name someone who could win the election over Black Republicans or any other divisive forces, and the man who had most of the votes
was the one for whom Yancey and Slidell were digging a cunning pit—Senator Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois.

Senator Douglas was a man about whom no one could be indifferent. He was either a remorseless scheming politician or a hero defending the eternal truth, the appraisal depending partly on the observer’s point of view and partly on what Douglas himself was up to at the moment. As a scheming politician he had opened the door for the great tempest in Kansas and now he was standing in the wind’s path, defying the storm and those who had made it; a man who could miscalculate disastrously but who would not under pressure run away from what he had done. Very few men either hated or admired him just a little. A passionate man himself, he evoked passion in others, in his friends and in his enemies.

In a party dominated by Southerners, he spoke for the muscular new Northwest—roughly, the area later generations would call the Middle West. A maker of odds would have considered him a likely winner. He was obviously the front runner, and while his managers had to find some way to push his majority up to the two-thirds mark, he did not seem to be opposed by anyone except a handful of favorite sons and the task should not be too hard. Douglas was not here himself, but his people had set up headquarters in Hibernian Hall, a block and a half from Institute Hall, where the convention would be held, and the place was packed and alive. There were scores of cots, so that no Douglas delegate need lack a place to sleep; there was an abundance of whisky on tap; and any visitor who lounged in and looked receptive was apt to find someone pressing a campaign biography of the Senator into his hand. The bubbling confidence of the Douglas leaders seemed to be justified.
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Yet there were disquieting omens. Of all the cities in America, the Democrats had chosen for this 1860 convention the one in which the climate for Senator Douglas’s candidacy would be the least favorable. The city itself was not so much in active opposition as living on the edge of a different world; it simply was not a place where the great Northwest could find its proper voice. Douglas himself had declared, somewhat brashly, in the heat of debate, that this Northwest, the limitless new land above the rivers and beyond the mountains, would yet “be able to speak the law to this nation
and to execute the law as spoken”; but was Charleston the place for it?