This second meeting of the convention was the signal for still further and bitterer wrangling. The Southerners again withdrew and in the end two candidates were nominated—Douglas by that part of the convention which claimed to be national and Breckinridge by the Southern wing.
This was a direct invitation to defeat. It not only compelled such a division of the Democratic vote as to render the success of either Democratic candidate impossible, but it was accompanied by the still further division of the forces opposed to the strictly sectional and geographical Republican party. The old Whigs and those in sympathy with their desire to preserve the Union if possible, had met in convention in Baltimore on the ninth of May, adopted, as their platform, resolutions pledging devotion to "the Union, the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws," and under the name of "the Constitutional Union party" nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice-president.
Their purpose was to bring to bear for the preservation of the Union the votes of a large body of men who would not vote for the Republican candidate on the one hand or for either of the Democratic candidates—presently to be nominated—on the other. Their hope was that among four candidates there would be no election, and that in an election by states in the House of Representatives their candidate might be chosen as one upon whom lovers of the Union could unite without regard to party.
When the election came they polled no less than 589,581 votes and carried thirty-nine electoral votes against Douglas's twelve and Breckinridge's seventy-two. But their hope of throwing the election into the House of Representatives was doomed to disappointment.
The Republican convention met at Chicago on May 16, and after some contest nominated Mr. Lincoln. When all the nominations were made, presenting three candidates in opposition to him, Mr. Lincoln's election was practically certain, with only the remote chance that the choice might be thrown into the House of Representatives, as a possible doubt of that result. In fact he was elected, though the majority against him on the popular vote was nearly a million.
In the meantime the canvass had mightily tended to additional embitterment. It had drawn the line more sharply than ever between the sections. It had completely disrupted and scattered into three warring groups all those forces that stood out against a party which had no being except in one section of the Union. It had familiarized men's minds with the idea of disunion. It had been a campaign of threats and defiances. It had well-nigh made an end of conservatism as a sentiment influential on either side. It had intensified distrust, accentuated hatred, embittered the relations of men, and prepared the minds of the people North and South for disunion and war.
The time had come which statesmen had so long foreboded when threats of disunion—oft repeated on both sides and usually received scoffingly as mere vaporings—took on a seriously menacing character. The time had come when the warring sectional interests, prejudices and principles were ready to make final appeal to the brutal arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. The situation had been strained to the breaking point, and the fact that it did not break at once was due to conditions and inspirations which need another chapter for their explanation.
CHAPTER X
The Birth of War
The election of Mr. Lincoln filled the whole country with alarmed apprehension. At the North no less than at the South men anxiously asked of themselves and of their neighbors "What is going to happen?"
What had already happened was something unprecedented in the history of the country. On its face it was merely the election of a president by a majority of the electoral college vote, against whose election there had been a heavy popular majority.
The like had happened several times before and the occurrence had never before excited the least apprehension or created the least alarm or suggested the smallest protest. It had been accepted in every case as a natural result of our complex electoral system, which combines representation of population with representation of the states as such without regard to population, and which gives to each state the right to cast the whole of its electoral vote in accordance with the will of a majority of its people. It was a recognized fact that under this system a president might easily be chosen by a minority vote of the people, provided that minority vote was so distributed among the states as to secure an electoral majority in his behalf. There was no ground of complaint, therefore, and in fact no complaint was anywhere made, that Mr. Lincoln was elected in the face of an adverse majority of about 950,000 popular votes.
But there was a much more significant, and, as it seemed to many minds, a much more alarming fact behind his election. That election was purely and exclusively sectional. Of the one hundred eighty electoral votes cast for him, not one had come from any state lying south of the Potomac or the Ohio nor had his candidacy been supported in the popular vote by even a handful in that half of the country. Both on the popular and on the electoral vote his support had been purely geographical, and even on geographical lines it had been little more than a majority. In the slave states he had had no support at all, while in the free states taken by themselves his popular majority was only 186,964, the vote of the free states standing 1,731,182 for him and 1,544,218 against him.
In other words, Mr. Lincoln was elected in face of an adverse popular majority of about 950,000 in the whole country, by a narrow popular majority of less than 200,000 in one section of the country. He was the candidate of a party which had absolutely no existence in the southern part of the Republic, and which existed avowedly only in antagonism to the institutions of that part of the country.
For the first time in the history of the Republic there had occurred a purely geographical election. For the first time, as the South interpreted the matter, one section of the country had assumed the right to govern another. For the first time a party dominating one section by a narrow majority and having no shadow of existence in the other section had come into power with authority to rule both, so far at least as executive and administrative power was concerned. For the first time that geographical division of the country had occurred in fear and dread of which as a possibility so many of the original states had hesitated to ratify the Constitution itself.
Worse still, so far as the future of the Republic was concerned, this purely geographical election had been sought and secured upon a purely geographical and sectional question. Refine the matter as the platform-makers might, and qualify and explain policies as the party did, the fact was as apparent then as it is now that the sole reason for the Republican party's existence was hostility to slavery and an earnest desire to abolish that institution in this land by whatever means there might be available to that end. That purpose alone held together in political union the otherwise discordant elements of which the party was composed. In other words a party founded exclusively upon hostility to the domestic institutions of the Southern States had elected a president by means of a purely sectional and geographical vote, against the expressed will of the people as reflected in a popular majority of nearly a million ballots.
These facts of history are here set forth not by way of condemnation and not at all with any intent to criticise them or the authors of them adversely, but solely in aid of understanding. They are set forth in order that the reader who was not born early enough in the nineteenth century to remember them may understand the conditions and circumstances that gave birth to the war.
The election of Mr. Lincoln under these circumstances and in this way was accepted by the extreme pro-slavery men at the South as a challenge to them to dissolve the Union if they dared. They proceeded to accept the challenge, but their influence was not dominant in Virginia or in those states which looked to Virginia for guidance in this crisis and the lack of such dominance was an embarrassment to them. South
