Coming Fury, Volume 1 (9 page)

In the winter of 1858 President Buchanan had urged Congress to admit Kansas as a state, the admission being based on a proposed constitution framed in a convention at the Kansas town of Lecompton. The Lecompton convention had been rigged, and the constitution itself was rigged; when the territorial voters were asked to pass on it, they had not been given a choice between slavery and no slavery. They could vote, if they chose, for the Lecompton constitution, which flatly stated the right of slave owners to continue to hold their slaves but forbade the importation of any more slaves,
or they could vote for the same constitution with a proviso that the slave trade would be continued; could vote, in short, for limited slavery or for unlimited slavery, but could not vote for no slavery. Free-state people in Kansas had boycotted the plebiscite, considering the whole business an arrant fraud; but Buchanan, under vast pressure from Southern leaders and hoping as well that the troublesome Kansas problem could at last be solved if the Lecompton constitution were adopted, had put on the heat. Douglas had fought him, the Lecompton constitution had died like the fading leaves of autumn, a subsequent vote had shown that free-state residents of Kansas far outnumbered the slave-state people, and Kansas was still a territory and a living vexatious problem. It was here that Douglas had sinned. He was out of line not only on a matter of doctrine but also on a crucial question of workaday politics, and he was going to be punished for it.

Douglas had been extremely clear in his attitude on what ought to be done with the Lecompton constitution. In the Senate he had expressed himself unmistakably: “If Kansas wants a slave-state constitution she has a right to it; if she wants a free-state constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.… I care not how that vote may stand.… I stand on the great principle of popular sovereignty, which declares the right of all people to be left perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way. I will follow that principle wherever its logical consequences may take me, and I will endeavor to defend it against assault from all quarters.”
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The right of the people to form and regulate their institutions will always be accepted by anyone who believes that the people will form and regulate things in his own particular way; but an American in that hour who declared that he did not care what the people did so long as they were allowed to do it was committing heresy against the zealots on both sides. Douglas now was detested equally, as a man devoid of principle, by the abolitionists and by the slave-state leaders.

The Davis resolutions passed the Senate on May 24. They were ineffective, except that their passage indicated that the coming Democratic meeting in Baltimore would almost certainly go the
way of the one at Charleston. Nothing could be compromised, after all; in this spring of 1860 the country’s most terrible problem was simply the fact that the will to compromise had gone out of so many people. Preparing for their meeting in Chicago, the Republicans gazed about joyously, with wild surmise; and little Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, considered the future and concluded that the nation was heading straight into unmeasured trouble.

Stephens was a wisp of a man, half an invalid, weighing no more than 100 pounds, shrill but movingly eloquent, a man who had been given one of the most haunting nicknames ever worn by an American politician: “The Little Pale Star from Georgia.” A former Whig, he had served in Congress and had known Lincoln there; the two had been drawn to one another, possibly because each man in his innermost brooding took a deeply tragic view of human existence. Stephens had supported Virginia’s R. M. T. Hunter for the nomination at Charleston, but when the split came he swung to Douglas. The strictest of strict constructionists on the states’ rights issue, he nevertheless believed that Southerners could fight for their just dues in the Union better than out of it. As the Democratic split grew wider, Stephens remarked that the men who were working for secession were driven by envy, hate, jealousy, spite—“these made war in heaven, which made devils of angels, and the same passions will make devils of men. The secession movement was instigated by nothing but bad passions. Patriotism, in my opinion, had no more to do with it than love of God had with the other revolt.”
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Not long after the deadlock at Charleston a friend asked Stephens: “What do you think of matters now?”

“Think of them?” repeated Stephens. “Why, that men will be cutting one another’s throats in a little while. In less than twelve months we shall be in a war, and that the bloodiest in history.”

The friend suggested that things might be patched up at Baltimore, but Stephens insisted there was no chance of it: “The party is split forever. The only hope was at Charleston.”

“But why,” asked the friend, “must we have civil war, even if the Republican candidate be elected?”

“Because,” said Stephens, “there are not virtue and patriotism and sense enough left in the country to avoid it. Mark me, when I
repeat that in less than twelve months we shall be in the midst of a bloody war. What is to become of us then God only knows. The Union will certainly be disrupted; and what will make it so disastrous is the way in which it will be done.”
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The Democrats had met and they would fruitlessly meet again, their division beyond healing; and meanwhile the Republicans were going to Chicago. They were going noisily, impatiently, like men who see the promised land not far ahead, and Editor Halstead observed that on the trains there was a good deal more drinking of whisky than there had been on any of the trains going to Charleston.
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The great Northwest was about to have its day, and it was not going to be quiet or restrained about it.

Halfway between Charleston and Chicago, in point of time, there was an unexpected development which arrested the attention briefly. On May 9 a number of aging politicians and distinguished-citizen types, who liked the look of things little better than Alexander Stephens did, met in Baltimore and, calling themselves the Constitutional Union Convention, nominated John Bell, of Tennessee, as their candidate for President. Mr. Bell could not conceivably be elected. He stood for moderation and the middle road in a country that just now was not listening to moderates, and the professional political operators were not with him. But he would win a certain number of votes just the same; he might even divide the Northern vote to such an extent that the election finally would be thrown into the House of Representatives. In the horse-trading that would result from this, anything at all might happen.

John Bell was an old-time leader of the Tennessee Whigs. In his sixties, a former Congressman, former Secretary of War, and present member of the Senate, he was a slaveholder who deplored strife, detested the Lecompton constitution, and believed that reasonable men could yet find a way out of their difficulties. A few years earlier he had supported the Know-Nothings, and he was popular all along the border; the new Constitutional Union party
was made up of remnants of the moribund Whig party and of the short-lived Know-Nothing party. Without especially meaning to, he stood now as an obstacle in the path of Senator Seward.

The Constitutional Union Convention had been a scratch affair, with representatives from twenty-four states. It had met in a former church, which was decorated with flags, an American eagle, and a large portrait of George Washington, and it tried valiantly to provide a voice for the people who had not yet given up hope. Presiding officer was Senator John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky. Crittenden was ancient, a veteran of the War of 1812, an old supporter of Henry Clay; he had held many state and national offices and he would spend his final years in a fight to keep the Union from dissolving. The convention applauded him, as indeed it applauded all other speakers; no one said anything very controversial, and every mention of the flag, the Constitution, the Union, and the founding fathers drew long cheers. It was almost as if the delegates were making noise in order to drown out the tramp of marching feet, off stage.

This convention denounced most political-party platforms as frauds, and adopted one of its own which was commendably brief and unassailable: it declared simply for the Constitution, the Union, and enforcement of the laws. Then, having nominated Mr. Bell, and having named the distinguished orator, Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, for Vice-President, it adjourned. It had not so much as mentioned slavery in the territories or the fugitive slave laws, and even John Brown had been referred to only twice, in passing. This was mostly a convention of old men, past their time but trying stoutly to work things out so that young men would not have to die in the years just ahead, and it represented a good deal of strength in the border states, where slavery existed on a softer basis than in the cotton South, and where men could occasionally argue about it without wanting to destroy one another. Actually, this convention was all but openly seeking an election that would be settled in Congress (where compromise might yet prevail), and Northern politicians noted that it would inevitably get many votes from members of the dying Know-Nothing party, who expressed their own deep fear of the advance of the nineteenth century by opposing the foreign-born and the Catholic rather than by running a temperature
over slavery. This group could win no election itself, but it might keep other people from winning. Its existence would affect what was going to happen in Chicago.
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So would Chicago itself. Despite the enthusiasm it had displayed, Charleston had been somewhat dignified and aloof, and Chicago never dreamed of being either of those things. The mere fact that the convention was being held here was evidence that western America had blown off the lid. As a city, Chicago was hardly a quarter-century old. Ten years ago it had been a raw frontier town of fewer than 30,000 inhabitants; it had more than 100,000 now, and although it remained raw, it was expansive, vibrant, explosively aware that to be the central city of the Northwest was somehow to be at the very hub of America. Just as the atmosphere of Charleston had had its influence on what the Democrats did there, so Chicago’s own atmosphere would shape what the Republicans would do. The party was new and the city was new, and each was growing too fast, and was too enthusiastic about its own growth to worry very much about restraint or dignified behavior.

The delegates would meet in a specially built auditorium—a sprawling two-story affair of lumber known as the Wigwam, measuring 180 feet along one side and 100 feet along the other. It had not been in existence when April began, but it was there now, built in six weeks at surprisingly moderate cost, with the area for the delegates laid out like an enormous stage, a series of spaces for spectators rising upward all about it, a gallery running around three sides. Nobody really knew how many people could be jammed into the place; estimates ranged from 6000 to more than double that number. Pillars were decorated with tinder-dry evergreen boughs, red, white, and blue streamers ran everywhere, and the hall was brilliantly lighted by flaring gas jets; all in all, the Wigwam must have been one of the most dangerous fire traps ever built in America. For the first time, the press gallery was provided with on-the-spot telegraph instruments. Never before had so many reporters tried to cover a convention: the press gallery, big as it was, did not have nearly enough room. More than 900 reporters applied for seats in a space designed to hold sixty.
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It was believed that the convention had brought in 25,000 visitors. Chicago contained forty-two hotels, and all of them
seemed to be jammed; one observer with a taste for odd statistics learned, or at least estimated, that fully 130 people, unable to rent better resting places, were sleeping on tables in the various hotel billiard rooms. On the Monday and Tuesday just before the opening day of May 16, there were incessant parades along Michigan Avenue, as special trains deposited state delegations and cheering crowds of the curious and the hangers-on. Battalions of Wide-Awakes, the party’s new marching clubs, flourishing torches and banners, tramped to and from the lake-front depot while brass bands played and enthusiastic Chicagoans set off rockets from the tops of buildings. Just as at Charleston, the henchmen who came along with the New York delegation struck the host city as rather uncouth; one dazed witness wrote that “they can drink more whiskey, swear as loud and long, sing as bad songs and get up and howl as ferociously as any crowd of Democrats you ever heard.”
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Before the convention ended, it would develop that Chicago could produce enthusiasts quite as noisy.

One thing was clear to everybody: Senator Seward was the man to beat. He was the country’s best-known Republican, the man with more delegates than anyone else had, and his campaign manager, wily Thurlow Weed, of Albany, knew all of the devious ways of politics and wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything in the world, to see Seward become President. Weed was installed in a suite at the Richmond House, holding day-long receptions for delegates who dropped in, or were brought in, to be cultivated, his aides busy everywhere. They were a mixture, these Weed-Seward headquarters men; among them were sluggers like Tom Hyer, the professional pugilist, solid men of commerce, such as Moses H. Grinnell, men of letters, like George W. Curtis—all of them, whatever they were doing, wearing an air of bright confidence. (One wag went so far as to pin a Seward badge, gaudy with the candidate’s name and likeness, on the back of Horace Greeley, the distinguished New York editor who wanted Seward beaten as poignantly as Weed wanted him nominated.) Their confidence was reasonable. The convention would cast 465 votes, and a simple majority, 233, would bring the nomination. Seward would certainly get close to 175 on the first ballot, and it seemed likely that
the momentum of enthusiasm (aided by loud noises from the galleries) could send him on to victory.
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