Lincoln's Election Puts Union on the Brink
Part 13 of a series. See complete list of series here.
This spring, a small cadre of Williams College students is participating in an experimental history course on the American Presidents. Instead of producing papers, as is the norm in most history classes, the students will create video campaign ads for the presidential elections from Washington to Lincoln.
There’s a catch, though. The students can only use images, quotes, documents, and music from the era. They cannot use anything that came afterwards. An image of the White House burning in 1812 would not work for the election of 1808. They cannot use images of Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, a product more reflective of the 1840s than the 1770s. Their assignment is to capture the spirit of the age – not the spirit of our historical memory.
RealClearHistory has agreed to partner with our class. Every week or so, RealClearHistory will display the best videos the students produce.
We began with John Adams’ 1796 election, and we end with this installment on the election of 1860. In our previous installment, Democrat James Buchanan fended off challenges from two new parties, the American Party and the Republican Party, to secure the presidency in 1856. Buchanan confronted a number of crises upon entering office. He did little to resolve any of them. In fact, his actions often made things worse. By the end of his term, the nation was poised for civil war. Many viewed the election of 1860 as the last chance to prevent disunion.
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According to regular surveys of presidential greatness, many historians regard James Buchanan as the nation’s worst president. He inherited a mess and made things worse. His term seemed to move from one crisis to the next. Whatever problem he faced, he always put party and sectional interests above all else. By the end of his four years, his poor leadership helped bring about the one thing Americans had hoped he could avoid when he was elected in 1856: the South’s secession.
Buchanan first confronted a contentious case before the Supreme Court, Dred Scott vs. Sandford. Dred Scott was a slave from Missouri, who, having spent time in the free territory of Wisconsin with his master, sued to have his status changed. A local court initially granted his request, stating that once free, always free, but a subsequent appeals court ruled against Scott by concluding that slave states need not recognize the laws of free states and that slave owners’ rights, though dormant in free states, were revived upon return to a slave state. The conflicting decisions sent the case to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s verdict had the potential to redefine slavery. With so much at stake, Buchanan decided to inject himself into the fray. Buchanan learned in advance that the court, dominated by southerners, was going to side with John Sanford, the owner of Scott, but there were no northern justices supporting the decision. Buchanan convinced a judge in his home state of Pennsylvania to concur with the decision, providing, he hoped, some veneer of cross-sectional unity.
Buchanan’s hope that the verdict could bring about national consensus faded as soon as the Court read its decision. Chief Justice Roger Taney intended his opinion to settle the slavery crisis. He made three determinations. First, Taney declared that blacks – free or otherwise – were not citizens and therefore possessed no political rights. Second, he concluded that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because Congress had no right to ban slavery. Third, he said that Congress could not take away property rights (including slave-holding), which allowed slave owners to bring slaves into all territories. The ruling shocked northerners. Slavery seemed to become universally legalized overnight. The whiff of executive pressure on the justices made the judgment even more troubling.
Next, Buchanan had to address the Kansas question, which had become even more complicated since his election. Kansas put Buchanan’s faith in popular sovereignty to the test when the territory began to draft a constitution as part of the statehood process. In the fall of 1857, pro-slavery forces held a constitution convention in Lecompton that, unsurprisingly, drafted a constitution that permitted slavery. The convention then moved for a statewide referendum on the constitution; voters could choose between the Lecompton Constitution with slavery or the same document without slavery. Anti-slavery forces boycotted the vote because they opposed the constitution even without slavery. Meanwhile, the legislature, dominated by anti-slavery forces, called for a straight vote either for or against the Lecompton Constitution with slavery. Pro-slavery forces boycotted this election.
Determining the validity of the Lecompton Constitution fell to Congress. Once again, Buchanan injected himself in the process by endorsing the Lecompton Constitution, which placed pressure on northern Democrats to follow his lead. However, congressional leaders countered this executive influence and struck a compromise that called for a federal referendum on the Lecompton Constitution. Kansans then voted the Lecompton Constitution down.
The volatile politics bred uncertainty in the markets, which, along with international events, sent the nation into a two-year recession. The economic and political turmoil fueled the rise of the nascent Republican Party, which seized control of the House and made significant inroads in the Senate in the 1858 elections. To the dismay of southerners, the party seemed well-positioned for the election of 1860.
Historians sometimes debate when the Civil War became inevitable. Some hold that the failure to address slavery at the founding set the nation on its path to civil war. Others point variously to the Missouri Compromise, the Mexican-American War, Dred Scott, and Kansas. Regardless of when – or even if – the Civil War became unavoidable, there is little doubt that Buchanan’s bungling leadership did little to slow the country’s move toward secession. Indeed, his actions seemed to have sped the nation toward conflict.
To be sure, the issues Buchanan encountered were large, complicated, and often predated his presidency. But he did himself no favors. Though he claimed to be a moderate who wanted to unite the nation, he surrounded himself with southerners who encouraged him to adopt their position whenever it came to controversial policies surrounding slavery. Insulated from northern opinion, Buchanan seemed unaware of the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the north.
In the end, Buchanan’s ineptitude led his party and then his nation to fracture in the election of 1860. At the Democratic Convention in Charleston, S.C., the party agreed that Buchanan had to go, but it split into two factions when it came to deciding on the nominee. One group rallied around Stephen Douglas. They stood for popular sovereignty for new states and federal noninterference with slavery in states where it existed. The southern wing demanded a more pro-slavery platform.
When the southern platform failed, a large contingent of southern delegates protested, and the convention disbanded to cool tempers. The party reconvened in Baltimore. With many southern delegates absenting themselves in protest, the party nominated Illinoisan Douglas. The southern wing of the party held a separate convention that supported Kentuckian John Breckenridge.
The Republican’s convention yielded a surprise nominee. Many expected the Republican Party to nominate William Seward, perhaps its most well-known member. The problem was that Seward was too abolitionist and too northern. Instead, the party settled on a man from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who had risen to prominence during a failed Senate campaign against Douglas in 1858. Though the party was home to many abolitionists, the official platform took a moderate position on slavery. It denounced the expansion of slavery into new territories, a challenge to the Dred Scott decision, but recognized the rights of slave states, a concession they hoped could keep the union together.
At the same time, the platform adopted strong language that condemned slavery as an immoral institution that should be on a path to extinction. It also took a clear side in the Kansas dispute by denouncing the Lecompton Constitution and rebuking the theory of popular sovereignty. Republicans believed that their platform offered a moderate approach to slavery because it said nothing about abolition, but southerners viewed the group as a radical abolitionist party.
(Campaign ads videos from 1860 election on Page 2)
