statement of fact to say that the disruption of the Union was brought about by the disunion of the Union forces.
The story is an interesting bit of history and a most significant one. But in order to understand it clearly the reader should bear in mind the excessively strained state of feeling in the country which has already been set forth in these pages. In aid of that let us briefly recapitulate.
The events of the recently preceding years had gone far to unseat conservatism, to breed a hopeless discouragement, and to induce a very general despair. The civil war in Kansas had been lawless, criminal and murderous on both sides.
It is impossible for any honest mind to approve the doings of the men on either side in that struggle, or to regard them otherwise than as criminal attempts to substitute force for law and fraud for freedom of the ballot.
Yet on each side the tu quoque argument was freely and justly used; on either side the criminal doings of the partisans of that side were regarded as a necessary offset to the criminal doings of the partisans of the other side. At the North the "free state men" were encouraged and supported by a large part of the press and pulpit. Great preachers pleaded from their sacred desks for contributions of money with which to arm the Northern men for this conflict. Great leaders of radical opinion employed the press and platform in the like behalf.
On the other hand, at the South, with a far less orderly organization of the forces that control popular opinion and action, there was an equally strong disposition manifested to support and encourage those Southern youths who had gone into Kansas to struggle for the establishment of slavery there. And on each side there was a manifest willingness to shut eyes to such lawlessness and such crime as the partisans of that side might find it necessary and convenient to commit in behalf of the "cause" they were set to serve.
Then had followed John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry to bring about that most terrible of all catastrophes, a slave insurrection. The attempt itself was so absurd in its lack of means conceivably adequate to the end proposed, and so clearly the work of a madman in that it involved a direct assault upon a national arsenal, making itself thus the insane challenge of a mere handful of men to the whole power of the United States, that it might have been dismissed from men's minds as men are accustomed to dismiss the vagaries of demented persons, but for one fact. The John Brown raid was seriously and earnestly approved by so many persons and pulpits and prints at the North, as was shown by funeral services and otherwise, that it was regarded at the South as a preliminary, typical, and threateningly suggestive manifestation of what Northern sentiment intended to do to the South whenever it should have the necessary power. How largely it was thus sanctioned was later shown by the fact that during the succeeding war the song that celebrated John Brown's raid made itself a national anthem declaring that in the advance of the national armies his "soul was marching on."
To the Southern people John Brown's attempt to stir up servile insurrection meant all of horror, all of slaughter, all of outrage to women and children that it is possible to conceive. It meant to them the overturning of society. It meant the dominance of a subject and inferior race outnumbering the whites in many states, a race ignorant and passionate in Virginia and Kentucky, and well-nigh savage in the cotton states. It meant rapine and murder—rape, outrage and burning.
There were still many at the South who desired and earnestly advocated the extirpation of slavery by any means that could be adopted with tolerable safety to Southern homes, but John Brown's program of abolition by servile war—a program which seemed to them to be accepted by Northern public sentiment—offered them a threat of desolation against which, if they were men, they were bound to revolt with all the force they could command. It called into instant and aggressive activity that fundamental impulse of humanity, the all-controlling instinct of self-preservation.
On the other side the increasingly insistent demand of the Southern extremists for the nationalization of slavery and their apparent ability to force such nationalization, through fugitive slave laws against which the consciences even of the most devoted lovers of the Union at the North revolted, and through the decisions of the Supreme Court, bred in that quarter a similar despair of lasting union. Hundreds of thousands who did not sympathize with the purpose to stir up servile war despairingly felt that the time had come when the demands of what was called "the slave power" must be resisted at any and all risks, and resigned themselves to the employment of any means that might be found necessary to that end. They felt that all compromises had failed, that all efforts to enable this Nation, as Mr. Lincoln phrased it, "permanently to endure half slave and half free," had been defeated and shown to be futile.
In brief, on both sides of the line of cleavage, a spirit of despairing readiness for any remedy, however drastic it might be, had been created by the inexorable circumstances of the "irrepressible conflict."
There is no doubt whatever that if the situation had been clearly understood, nine in ten of all Northern people would have shrunk with horror from such a program of destruction as that which John Brown's raid implied and intended—namely the overthrow of the United States Government and the inauguration of a servile insurrection at the South.
But the conditions were not clearly understood upon either side. Upon neither side did the people really know precisely how the facts of the situation presented themselves to the people on the other side. On neither side was there enough of calm, impartial deliberation to distinguish between the excesses of sentiment and conduct and provoking self-assertion on the part of extremists on the other side and the settled purposes of the great majority. Still worse, on neither side was there enough resolute calmness to relegate the small body of extremists to their proper place as a minority, and to take matters out of their hands.
The thought of secession rapidly gained ground at the South. The "slangy" slogan of N. P. Banks—"Let the Union slide"—was accepted as a policy by increasing multitudes at the North.
It was in such conditions that political parties made their preparations for the presidential campaign of 1860.
The Democratic party represented the only opposition to Republicanism which had any hope or possibility of success. It was in a clear and commanding majority in the Nation. The old Whig party had dwindled to a remnant, and the greater part of that remnant would have voted for the Democratic candidate in an election directly presenting the issue of Democracy and nationalism against Republicanism and a geographical division of the people into parties.
But the Democratic party was itself hopelessly divided. The radical pro-slavery men at the South had made up their minds to disunion as a thing desirable and necessary. They did not want the Democratic or any other national party to win unless they could themselves dominate and control it. The extreme men among them wanted the Republicans to succeed in the election in order that there might be an excuse for secession.
The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, S. C., on April 23, 1860. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from the beginning was the first choice of a majority of the delegates as the party's candidate, but he could not command that two-thirds' vote which the party had always insisted upon as a condition precedent to nomination. In his Illinois campaign against Lincoln in 1858, Douglas had been logically forced to make certain admissions as to the right of the people in a territory to exclude slavery from it before it became a state, which deeply offended the extremists of the South. There was also in effective play the active desire of these extremists to disrupt the party and secure its defeat as a pretext for secession. To have nominated Douglas at that time would have been to elect him with absolute certainty, and to have elected him in 1860 would have been to postpone the program of secession for at least four years.
So from the beginning to the end the radical pro-slavery men held out against Douglas's nomination. They in the end seceded from the convention and after ten days of fruitless wrangling that body adjourned without making a nomination or adopting a platform, to meet again at Baltimore on the eighteenth of
