Coming Fury, Volume 1 (5 page)

Douglas was under dual pressures, from the sectionalists of North and South alike. The gist of the Davis resolutions was simply an assertion that the slavery issue was untouchable; in the frenzy built up by the John Brown raid, the South was likely to agree with deep determination. But the untouchable had to be touched,
for there were determined men in the North who felt quite as deeply about it as any Southerner. The John Brown episode had stirred profound passions in the North as well as in the South. The institution of slavery had one maddening quality: it ennobled its opponents. John Brown was a brutal murderer if there ever was one, and yet to many thousands he had become a martyr, made a martyr by the character of the thing he attacked. Unbalanced to the verge of outright madness, he had touched a profound moral issue, an issue that ran so deep that he took on a strange and moving dignity when he stood upon the scaffold. If what he had done made adoption of a slave code seem essential in the South, it also made acceptance of such a code unthinkable in the North.

Before the month of February ended, Douglas came under Northern fire. It came from a Republican, rather than from a Northern Democrat, but it illustrated perfectly the size of the obstacle he would meet if he campaigned in the Northwest on anything like the Davis resolutions; and it was delivered by his old opponent in the 1858 Senatorial campaign, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who went on to New York on February 27 to make a speech before a substantial audience at the Cooper Institute.

Lincoln was not quite a national figure at this time. His long debate with Douglas in 1858 for the Illinois Senatorial seat had drawn attention, and he had maneuvered Douglas into frank statement of that Freeport doctrine which slavery leaders found so vicious, but he was still comparatively a minor figure in the Republican party. He was being brought to New York by Republicans who opposed Seward and thought that this effective speaker might offset Seward’s predominant strength in the party, and he came with some nervousness, fearing that he might be a little too Western, too countrified, for a New York audience; but he got a cordial reception, and he immediately aimed his guns at Douglas and at the whole pro-slavery position. He made it clear that although Douglas might seem hostile to slavery in the South, there were Northerners who considered him altogether too friendly to it; for slavery was “an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”

This was the inadmissible point. Lincoln spoke for men who
were willing to agree that the institution was not to be touched—not
now
; but they insisted that it must be recognized as a wrong which must be contained in such a way that it could some day die a natural death. Looking beyond his immediate audience to the men of the South, Lincoln put his finger on the problem to which American politics could not find the solution: “The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task.”
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Two days after Lincoln spoke, Senator Seward arose in the Senate to contribute his own bit. He was untidy, carelessly slouchy, hoarse of voice, a man described by Editor Halstead as “a jay bird with a sparrow hawk’s bill”; and the South hated him for having spoken of an irrepressible conflict. He was disowning the irrepressible conflict now, speaking hopefully of the Union as something that would endure despite temporary storms, but his voice brought no healing. If the Union were to be assailed, he said, the assault could come only from the Democratic party, for the threat of disunion was made, if not in that party’s name, at least in its behalf, and he spoke of the existing turmoil as of something that arose because “a great policy fastened upon the country through its doubts and fears, confirmed by its habits, and strengthened by personal interests and ambitions, is to be relaxed and changed.”
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Saying this, Seward came mortally close to touching the untouchable; at the very least he was going opposite to the spirit of the Davis resolutions, and he offered no help at all to Lincoln’s despairing complaint: “We must somehow convince them that we do let them alone.”

These men were moderates—Lincoln and Davis, Seward and Douglas. Each man had a love for the Union, an awareness of the mysterious force that operates as a sort of continental destiny. But in this winter when the lines were growing taut, each man was reaching a position from which he could not retreat and on which he would not compromise.

Davis believed that the North must willingly adapt itself to the fact of slavery. Slavery existed and it had to be accepted; it should not be agitated as a moral issue by people remote from it. When Northerners interfered with slavery, they interfered with the well-being and hopes of the whole Southern community, and the very
attempt to contain and limit slavery, looking as it did toward its eventual demise,
was
interference despite all disclaimers. People in the North must make the necessary adjustments to something which, after all, was a purely Southern concern.

Lincoln and Seward had come to an opposite position. They saw slavery as an evil affecting the entire country, and although they were willing to accept its present existence as a hard fact, they refused to admit that it must be extended into the indefinite future. They could stomach even the fugitive slave laws if—and only if—they could be sure that some day no such laws would be necessary. Like Davis, they were being driven into sectionalism, and were leaders in a purely sectional party, because slavery itself was sectional.

Douglas was the most flexible of the group. He was perfectly willing to tolerate slavery as long as his toleration did not require him to do intolerable things. Slavery could be voted up or down in the territories, as far as he was concerned, so long as it was at least disposed of by the people directly concerned; he wanted it to cease to be a constant irritant, and he hoped that the country could get on with its other business. Standing in the middle, he stood also in storm center, and sometimes it seemed as if everybody was fighting him.

Thus the moderates, as immoderate winds gathered: the forces that drove them being the same as those that blew in on the delegates at Charleston. With the moderates the will to work out some sort of solution survived; with lesser men the will to hate and to hurt grew strong. Symptomatic of this was the action, in this same session of a divided Congress, a short echo ahead of the Charleston convention, of Congressman Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, who stood up on April 5 to address his fellow legislators.

Lovejoy had been through the mill. He had seen his older brother, Elijah, preacher of abolition, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, more than twenty years earlier, and kneeling by his body had vowed “never to forsake the cause”; he had been a minister and an anti-slavery agitator, and in 1856 had been elected to Congress, a die-hard Free-Soil Republican who bore scars from his long fight against slavery. He spoke now as too many others were speaking—out of complete conviction that his own cause was
reasonable and right and that men who opposed him were willfully wrong in the head; spoke not so much to convince as to castigate, to discharge anger that could no longer be contained. Breathing upon the tempest, he made it blow all the harder.

Slavery, he declared, was the sum of all villainies, worse than robbery, worse than piracy, worse than polygamy: “It has the violence of robbery, the blood and cruelty of piracy, it has the offensive and brutal lusts of polygamy, all combined and concentrated in itself.” If heaven were run on slaveholding principles, Jehovah would be a Juggernaut “rolling the huge wheels of his omnipotence, axle-deep, amid the crushed and mangled and bleeding bodies of human beings.” As he spoke, waving his arms, his fists clenched, Lovejoy stalked over to the Democratic side of the House to speak into the faces of his opponents, and Virginia’s Roger Pryor came out to meet him, shouting that it was bad enough to have to listen to such talk “but he shall not, sir, come upon this side of the House, shaking his fist in our faces.” A Republican from Wisconsin, John Potter, cried that Democrats were just as offensive when they made speeches, and got into such a wrangle with Pryor that he was challenged to fight a duel. (He accepted, specifying that they must fight with bowie knives; Pryor’s second replied that these were outside the code, and in the end there was no duel.) Thirty or forty Congressmen gathered about the speaker, some to heckle Love joy, others to demand that people stay on their own side of the House; all to no effect whatever. Congressman William Barksdale, of Mississippi, grated out: “Order that black-hearted scoundrel and nigger-stealing thief to take his seat and this side of the House will do it”—and, after contributing some spirited columns to the
Congressional Globe
, Love joy came to a close and the uproar died down.
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A Congress in this mood was not likely to do anything very constructive in the way of passing legislation; yet the House did manage, early in March, to pass a homestead bill that would grant Western land, free, to any adult American who cared to settle and make a farm—a thing greatly desired by the free-state North, solidly opposed by the South. Strangely, the thing was not debated at length, although it offered a more fundamental threat to the future of slavery than anything the most ranting abolitionist could
say in or out of Congress. With little talk it was sent on to the Senate, where at last it was amended out of all likeness to the original. Eventually, considering that he would thereby strike a blow at Douglas, President Buchanan vetoed it.
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Yet although the whole Congressional session had been filled with talk of secession and war—and, by its mad unbalance, had given the nation a certain push in that direction—most men did not seem to think that war would ever occur. There came before the House, in this session, a naval appropriation bill, and on motion of John Sherman the estimate for repairs and re-equipment was sliced by a million dollars. Lovejoy, of all people, agreed with him, asserting: “I am tired of appropriating money for the army and navy when, absolutely, they are of no use whatever … I want to strike a blow at this whole naval expenditure and let the navy go out of existence.”
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So the appropriation was reduced, and the navy’s ability to put its warships in order was limited; one result being that U.S.S.
Merrimack
, in the Norfolk Navy Yard for engine overhaul, lay unrepaired at her dock … to emerge, two years after Love joy’s speech, as the terrifying ironclad C.S.S.
Virginia
.

It had been unseasonably hot and dry in Charleston through most of April, but a cool rain drifted in just before the Democratic convention was called to order, at noon on April 23, and Institute Hall was fairly comfortable when the delegates crowded in to find their places. The big auditorium had a level floor, with long rows of plain wooden chairs bolted together; above there was a gallery in which, by agreement, a third of the seats had been reserved for the ladies of Charleston. Making his way to the press section, where reporters were ready with piles of paper, pencils sharpened at both ends, and a messenger to rush copy off to the telegraph office, Editor Halstead took a leisurely look about him and noted disapprovingly that there was “a good deal of gaudy and uncouth ornamentation” about the hall, with inexpert frescoing over the stage.
It quickly developed, also, that the acoustics were very bad, largely because loaded wagons and drays were constantly rattling along over the cobblestoned street just outside, creating a powerful racket. The invocation, delivered by “a fine, fat old clergyman” from the deep South, was totally inaudible, at least to earthly listeners, and the authorities hastily arranged to have loads of sawdust dumped in the roadway to deaden the noise.
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On this first day there was not, actually, a great deal for anyone to listen to. There was a spirited wrangle over appointment of a committee on credentials and organization, with a certain amount of oratory to which the delegates paid a minimum of attention, but the real struggle was not quite ready to boil over from committee and caucus rooms to the floor of the convention. Floor manager for the Douglas forces was broad-shouldered, harsh-voiced W. A. Richardson, of Quincy, Illinois, dominating his following and his section of the hall by the force of his strong personality. He had joined in the row over organization, making a brief speech on the matter, but for the moment his real responsibilities would be met off the floor. With him as lieutenant was an Illinoisan with the pleasing nickname of “For God’s Sake Linder”—a title acquired a few years earlier when Douglas, in the heat of some state political fight, had wired him “For God’s sake Linder come down here I need help.” Bustling, sweating, with rumpled linen, Linder was very busy, looking somehow like the sort of man to whom one would say “For God’s sake.”
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At the end of the day, when the convention adjourned for the night, nothing in particular had taken place.

Things happened off the stage, however, that evening, that would be of lasting importance, and the next morning Halstead detected a feeling that “the convention is destined to explode in a grand row.” This row did not immediately develop; indeed, as the second day’s session began, the Douglas floor managers won a victory that might be decisive. By majority vote, the convention agreed that unless a state convention, instructing its delegation, had provided otherwise, delegates need not be bound by the unit rule. It was believed that this would free as many as forty pro-Douglas delegates from the control of certain delegations where a majority was anti-Douglas; Manager Richardson had gained something here,
for Douglas now would almost certainly get a majority of the votes when the balloting started, and that in itself would give powerful impetus to his attempt to get the necessary two thirds. If this convention went by the ordinary rules of politics, Senator Douglas was well on his way.
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