The American Vice Presidency (24 page)

When in 1854 the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act on the basis of the concept of popular sovereignty, individual territories were left to decide whether they would accept or outlaw slavery. Settlers in the territories, Breckinridge argued, should be “free to form their own institutions, and enter the Union with or without slavery, as their constitutions should prescribe.”
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The clash over the Kansas-Nebraska Act further ignited northern animosity toward slavery and its southern proponents, feeding the disintegration of the Whig Party. Its remnants gave rise to the new Republican Party, as well as the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party, which came to be known as the Know-Nothings. The spread of the latter helped persuade Breckinridge that his reelection to the Senate as a Democrat was so imperiled that he did not seek a third term. Still in his mid-thirties, he returned to Kentucky and focused on land speculation in the western territories to restore his financial health.

Breckinridge’s loyalty to the Union while clinging to the peculiar institution made him an attractive prospect for the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1856. Seeking reelection, President Franklin Pierce, soiled politically in the Kansas-Nebraska row, was challenged by Douglas and Buchanan. The latter, most recently minister to Great Britain, was thereby out of the line of fire in the heated dispute over Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas fell behind in the voting and withdrew in the cause of unity, making Buchanan the nominee as a less divisive figure in the slavery conversation.

As nominations for vice president began, the Kentucky delegation appeared to be throwing a monkey wrench into the prospects of native son Breckinridge by nominating a fellow Kentuckian, the former House Speaker Linn Boyd. Breckinridge rose and said he would not run against him, making a speech that so captured the convention that the delegates insisted on him, and he was nominated on the second ballot.

The Buchanan-Breckinridge ticket faced a new lineup in the fall. With
the Whig Party in shreds, many of its leaders, including William Seward, threw in with the new national alignment calling itself the Republican Party, which convened in Philadelphia in June 1856. There it wrote a strong free-soil, anti-slavery expansion platform without condemning the practice where it already existed, and it nominated John Charles Fremont, a soldier and explorer, for the presidency. Meanwhile the Know-Nothings, another refuge for the fallen-away Whigs, having gained support in the latest state and congressional elections, nominated former president Fillmore.

While Buchanan dodged the slavery controversy as best he could, Breckinridge pitched for southern votes as a staunch defender of the right of (white) citizens in the territories to write their own laws. On a speaking tour through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he accused the Republican Party of threatening the existence of the Union, declaring, “He must be blind indeed, and given over to fatal delusion, who does not see that the Union of the States is in imminent peril.” He charged northern Whigs with “hurling every epithet of hate and ignominy against their brethren of the South,” fostering “sectional hostility … fed by misrepresentations of the opinions and feelings of the Southern people.” He warned that the Republican Party’s ulterior purpose regarding slavery was “to combine public opinion and public action in such a form as to abolish the institution wherever it exists.”
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In November the Democrats behind Buchanan and Breckinridge carried all of the slaveholding states except Maryland, which voted for the Know-Nothings, and won Kentucky for the first time in a presidential election, to Breckinridge’s gratification.
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But he soon realized that he was to suffer the same fate of isolation in the new administration that had fallen to most of his predecessors.

On one early occasion, when Breckinridge sought an interview with Buchanan, he was referred to the president’s niece and hostess, Harriet Lane, Buchanan being a bachelor. Insulted at the rude dismissal, Breckinridge left town without contacting her. When word of the apparent rebuff reached Buchanan, he had three of his aides write his vice president pleading a misunderstanding. Breckinridge was told that the instruction to contact Miss Lane was some kind of password to gain admission to the presidential presence. Still, Breckinridge never met with Buchanan privately over the next three years.

Breckinridge’s pro-slavery views found him in the middle of intensifying hostility between Buchanan and Stephen Douglas over Kansas, where rival groups split on slavery. Breckinridge sided with the president on admitting Kansas to the Union as a slave state but quietly favored Douglas’s reelection to the Senate, which Buchanan fiercely opposed. Invited by the Illinois Democratic Committee to speak in behalf of Douglas during his famous debates with Lincoln, Breckinridge politely declined. But he added he had “often in conversation expressed the wish that Mr. Douglas may succeed over his Republican competitor.”
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As president of the Senate, Breckinridge was in the chair on January 4, 1859, when the body met for the last time in its small chamber before moving to the new, larger Senate. Despite his stout defense of slavery, he remained at this time opposed to secession over it. He liked to tell of a dinner party conversation with a South Carolina congressman about meeting a state militiaman in South Carolina who said of the possibility of war over secession, “I tell you, sah, we cannot stand it any longer. We intend to fight.” Breckinridge said he asked, “And from what are you suffering?” The man replied, “Why, sah, we are suffering from the oppression of the Federal Government. We have suffered under it for thirty years, and will stand it no more.” Breckinridge suggested to his host that he invite some of his constituents to visit the North “if only for the purpose of teaching them what an almighty big country they will have to whip before they get through!”
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With the Buchanan administration in disarray and Breckinridge’s own prospects diminishing for a second term, another opportunity suddenly arose when Senator Linn Boyd of Kentucky died. Kentucky Democrats thereupon nominated Breckinridge for the Senate seat upon completion of his vice presidency, a welcome prospect to salve his uncertainty. Meanwhile, the presidential election year of 1860 approached with the controversy over slavery and its boiling point growing ever closer.

In February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi introduced a series of resolutions laying out the demands of the most extreme southern senators. They called for a national slave code protecting the peculiar institution in the territories, reaffirming personal liberty laws on slave ownership, and declaring attacks on it unconstitutional. Davis offered them on the floor but sought adoption only in the Senate Democratic caucus, to
undermine Douglas and his advocacy of popular sovereignty in advance of the Democratic National Convention in Charleston in April.

There, Davis submitted his resolutions as a campaign plank endorsed by a majority of the platform committee, obliging the Douglas forces to fight for a rival minority report. One Ohio delegate warned the southerners, “You cannot expect one northern electoral vote, or one sympathizing member of Congress from the free states,” both of which were needed to put another Democrat in the White House.
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After several days of heated debate, a compromise was struck but was boycotted by the Deep South delegates, who walked out. An effort by the remaining delegates to nominate Douglas was defeated, and they decided to adjourn and meet again in June.

In the meantime, the Republicans convened in Chicago, where Lincoln, arguing that slavery had to be contained and that Congress had a right to exclude slavery from the territories, was the surprise choice over William Seward of New York. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was picked as Lincoln’s running mate. Also in June, border-state and other remnants of the shattered Whigs met in Baltimore as the Constitutional Union Party and, hoping to head off secession, nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president.

In Baltimore as well, the mostly northern Democratic delegates reconvened in June and nominated Douglas, adhering to his support of popular sovereignty on slavery expansion, with Senator Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia as his running mate. The southern Democrats met separately in Baltimore and nominated Breckinridge for president and Joseph Lane as his running mate, an Oregon Democrat who was originally from Kentucky and shared southern sentiments. The divisions set up an unprecedented four-way general election for the Oval Office in November, with the fate of slavery at stake.

Breckinridge considered long about accepting the nomination of a splintered segment of his party, with fewer than half the Kentucky delegates to the original Democratic convention in Baltimore attending the subsequent gathering of the southerners. “When I discovered, though with regret, that my name had been presented to the country,” he said later, “it did not take me long to determine that I would not meanly abandon those with whom I was determined to act.” Long afterward, Jefferson Davis’s wife
wrote that Breckinridge had told her on accepting the nomination, “I trust that I have the courage to lead a forlorn hope.”
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The southern Democratic nominee vowed to campaign little before the November election, but charges from Douglas and other foes against his loyalty and consistency persuaded him to answer them. At a large barbecue in Kentucky, he delivered a three-hour defense, denying that he had ever petitioned for the pardon of abolitionist John Brown, or that he had supported the Whig Zachary Taylor against the Democrat Lewis Cass in 1848, or that he had once backed the emancipation of blacks in Kentucky or favored the admissibility of a territory to bar slavery. The last stance put him in conflict with Douglas, who charged that the southern Democrats were out to break up the Union. Breckinridge insisted he had never made “an utterance to reveal a thought of mine hostile to the Constitution and union of the States.” Douglas responded that while he was not saying “all the Breckinridge men” were “disunionists,” there was “not a disunionist in America who [was] not a Breckinridge man.”
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The Kentuckian, fearing that the Democratic split would put the Republican Party in power for the first time, initially considered bowing out but was persuaded by Jefferson Davis to stay in the race. As the prospect of a Lincoln victory loomed larger, Davis next proposed that all three Democrats—Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell—withdraw and back a compromise candidate. Breckinridge and Bell agreed, but Douglas refused, arguing that northern Democrats would never support the choice endorsed by the southern Democrats and would take their chances with Lincoln.

He was right. Lincoln won only 40 percent of the popular vote but the majority required in the electoral college, where Breckinridge finished second, all his electoral votes coming from the South. After the election Breckinridge returned to the Senate to finish out his service as presiding officer. In December, four southern states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida—took the fateful step out of the Union, and in January he watched as his friend Davis led a group of other southern senators as part of the exodus. In March, one of Breckinridge’s last duties in the second office was to swear in Hamlin as his successor, who then gave the Senate oath to the Kentuckian, who had been sent back by his state to his old seat.

In the early morning of April 12, South Carolina Guard troops fired on
Fort Sumter, and the Civil War was on. On July 4, Lincoln called a special session of Congress to pass legislation raising more soldiers and money for the conduct of the war. Breckinridge returned to Washington to lead remaining Senate Democrats in what was for him indeed a forlorn exercise, trying to limit the powers of the federal government as he perceived the Constitution to do. He called on the Senate to urge Lincoln to withdraw all federal troops from the seceded states and warned that the border states would join with the Deep South states if federal force was used against them.

As for his own Kentucky, he said, “She will exhaust all honorable means to reunite these States [into the Union], but if that fails … turning to her southern sisters, with whom she is identified by geographic position and by the ties of friendship, of intercourse, of commerce, and of common wrongs, she will unite with them to found a noble Republic, and invite beneath its stainless banner such other states as know how … to respect constitutional obligations and the comity of a confederacy.”
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As the special session continued on August 1, Breckinridge spoke on the Senate floor against Lincoln’s order to expand martial law. The Oregon Republican senator Edward D. Baker entered the chamber wearing a Union blue uniform and took issue with him. “These speeches of his, soon broadcast over the land, what meaning have they?” he asked. “Are they not intended for disorganization in our very midst? Sir, are they not words of brilliant, polished treason, even in the very Capitol?”
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Asked by Baker what he would do about the dire situation, Breckinridge said he would “have us stop the war,” adding, “I would prefer to see these States all reunited upon true constitutional principles to any other object that could be offered me in life.… But I definitely prefer to see a peaceful restoration of these States, than to see endless, devastating war, at the end of which I see the grave of public liberty and of personal freedom.”
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Soon after, Colonel Baker was killed leading his militia in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, along the banks of the Potomac. Breckinridge returned to Kentucky after the special session, speaking for peace and saying if Kentucky went to war against the Confederacy he could no longer represent the state in the Senate. Pro-Union forces subsequently won the state legislative elections, and on September 21, the legislature sent troops to break up another large peace rally and arrest Breckinridge. But he fled to Virginia, where he
joined the Confederate army in Richmond, observing that he was proudly exchanging his “term of six years in the Senate of the United States for the musket of a soldier.”
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On December 4 the Senate expelled him by a vote of thirty-six to zero, declaring him a traitor who had “joined the enemies of the country.”
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