Part 9

The “Whigs,” with whom Mr. Lincoln then acted, profited adroitly by this excitement in both sections. They avoided the subject of slavery altogether, and nominated for the Presidency in 1848 General Taylor, a slaveholder of Louisiana, who had won a wide and well-deserved popularity as a military commander in the Mexican war, and a man of “moderate” views on all subjects. With him they associated Mr. Fillmore, a respectable citizen of New York. The friends of Ex-President Van Buren united in that State with the anti-slavery men in an independent nomination of Ex-President Van Buren and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as the candidates of a new third party which took the name of the “Free Soil” party. This party declared that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the States in which it already existed; that it was the duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories; and that Congress had a constitutional right to abolish slavery in the Federal district of Columbia, which is the seat of the Federal Government. The result of all this was the election of Taylor and Fillmore, who received 163 votes in the electoral colleges against 127 cast for Cass and Butler, the Democratic candidates, and a popular plurality over those candidates of less than 150,000 in a total of somewhat less than 3,000,000 votes.

But the “Whig” triumph was short-lived. The gold discoveries in California gave such a sudden and tremendous impetus to the settlement of the new Pacific empire of the Union as “forced the hand” of the new Administration; and General Taylor dying in July 1849, while Congress and the country were hotly contending over the social and political organization of that new empire, his successor, Mr. Fillmore, with Daniel Webster as his Secretary of State, threw the weight of the Administration against the anti-slavery agitation and in favor of what were called the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. These measures admitted California without extending to the Pacific the boundary line between free and slave territory fixed by the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, and left slavery untouched in the Federal district. Of course such a compromise neither quieted the alarms of the slaveholding South nor satisfied the aggressive abolitionists of the North. But the country accepted it, and at the next Presidential election, in 1852, the Democratic candidate, General Pierce of New Hampshire, was elected by an overwhelming majority, carrying four of the New England States, the great Middle States of New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois at the West, all the Southern States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, and the new State on the Pacific, California. He received 254 electoral votes against 42 thrown for his Whig antagonist, General Scott, who had led the armies of the Union to their crowning victories in Mexico, and who had been a conspicuous military personage in the United States ever since the second war of 1812 with Great Britain.

There could scarcely have been a more decisive proof than this election gave that the Democratic party of the United States is really the permanent and enduring “party of the people,” without distinction of sections; for the tremendous victory won by General Pierce was distinctly due to the general, though, as it proved, the mistaken, impression of the masses of the people, that the irritating question of slavery in its Federal relations had been taken out of the arena of politics by the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. This was so clear that the opponents of the Democratic party, representing the shattered elements of the Whig party and the friends, as Mr. Bright would say, of “Protection and Monopoly,” changed front suddenly and concentrated all their efforts on a revival and extension of the anti-slavery agitation, as being the only program which offered them a hope of breaking down again, even for a time, the ascendency of Democratic principles. In this effort they were naturally seconded not only by the Northern abolitionists, but by the extreme partisans of slavery at the South. The value of slave property had been enormously increased by the sudden development of trade and manufactures all over the world, and especially in Great Britain and the United States, which resulted from the gold discoveries in California and Australia, and from the adoption, first in the United States under a great Democratic Secretary of the Treasury, Robert J. Walker, in 1846, of a liberal tariff, and then, in Great Britain, of what is not perhaps with perfect accuracy called the “Free Trade” policy of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden. One might almost say that the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire and New England fell into a conspiracy to delude the slaveholders of the South into those dreams of a vast slaveholding empire surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, which began, at the period of which I now write, to shake the foundations of the Union by fascinating the minds of grasping and ambitious men in that part of the United States.

In February, 1853, before the inauguration of President Pierce, a Democratic Senator, Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidential nomination in the preceding year, took the occasion presented by a bill for organizing a new Western Territory, Nebraska (which included the two now existing States of Nebraska and of Kansas), to propose a repeal of the old “Missouri Compromise,” to which I have more than once alluded. By this measure—a “Federalist,” not a Democratic measure—adopted in 1820, it was provided that slavery should never be carried into any Territory north of the fixed line of 36° 30´ north latitude. I have already mentioned that Congress refused to extend this line to the Pacific during the discussions which attended the admission of California in 1850; and I am sure that no one who knew Senator Douglas will differ from me now, when I say that he undoubtedly hoped by urging the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was voted by Congress the 25th of May, 1854, to get the whole question whether slavery should or should not be introduced into new Territories, and so into the new States of the Union, relegated from the domain of Congressional action into that of “popular sovereignty.” It was not the purpose either of the small minority at the South who desired disunion as the first step towards the founding of a “semi-tropical empire,” or of the more considerable minority at the North who preferred the risk of disunion to the toleration of slavery under the American flag, that this question should be taken out of the domain of Congressional action, and the expectations of Senator Douglas were disappointed. The repeal of the “Missouri Compromise” simply turned Kansas into a battle-ground. It led rapidly up to a succession of armed conflicts within that Territory between organised bands of Northern and of Southern “emigrants,” which set fire to the popular passions in both sections of the country, “swamped” the attempt of a section of the now disbanding “Whig” party to capture power by organising the prejudices of race and of religion into a secret political order of “Native Americans” or “Know-nothings,” and gave vitality and success to the more serious and sustained efforts of a much larger section of the “Whigs,” who devoted themselves to founding a new party which should combine the permanent objects “of Protection and Monopoly” with the temporary and immediate object of restricting slavery within the limits of the then existing slave States. Thanks to this section of the “Whigs,” the modern “Republican Party” was formed in 1854, which, after precipitating the country into civil war by the election of President Lincoln (against whom it revolted, as I shall show, when he had carried through to victory the terrible task it imposed upon him), after retarding the pacification of the Union for years by its policy of military “reconstruction” at the South, and after inflicting upon the taxpayers of the United States burdens undreamed of by the original “Whigs” in their most extravagant days of “paternalism,” has now finally come to the ground under the candidacy of two of its most thoroughly representative leaders, Mr. Blaine and General Logan.

The chief spirit of the new “Republican” party was Ex-Governor Seward, the leader of the Whigs of New York, a consummate politician, “honest himself,” as one of his special friends said of him, “but indifferent to honesty in others,” who labored with uncommon skill and adroitness for six years to build the new organisation up into Presidential proportions, only to experience the common fate of such party leaders in the United States, and to find himself set aside by his own Republican Convention of 1860, at Chicago, in favor of the then relatively obscure Western candidate Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.

The old name “Republican” used by the party of Jefferson was taken by the new party for the express purpose of dissimulating, as far as might be, its “Whig” parentage, and of thus recommending it to the widespread and growing anti-slavery element among the Democrats of the North and West. The Whig origin and tendencies of the new party, however, clearly appeared in the demand made in its first platform of 1856 for “appropriations by Congress for the improvement of rivers and harbors.” It selected as its first Presidential candidate in 1856 Colonel John C. Fremont of California, an officer of the army who had married the daughter of an eminent Democratic senator, Mr. Benton of Missouri, and who had acquired a kind of romantic popular prestige as “the Pathfinder of the Rocky Mountains” by an expedition across the continent. With him was associated as Vice-Presidential candidate a man of more political weight and force, Mr. Dayton, a Whig leader, of New Jersey, who afterwards rendered the country distinguished services as Minister to France under President Lincoln. Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania was nominated by the Democrats to succeed President Pierce in 1856. In the “platform” then adopted the Democratic party met the “Protectionist” tendency of the new “Republican” organisation by declaring “that justice and sound policy forbid the Federal Government to foster one branch of industry to the detriment of another;” denounced the attempt of the Whig “Know-Nothings” to organise a crusade against Catholics and citizens of alien birth; and in the matter of slavery reaffirmed “the compromise of 1850,” and committed itself to “the determined conservation of the Union and the non-interference of Congress with slavery in the territories or the district of Columbia.”

The new “Republican party” in its “platform” of 1856, let me here observe, raised no question touching slavery where slavery then existed, but pronounced it to be “both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery;” this latter attack on the Mormons being a bid for votes at the West and an appeal to the religious prejudices of the East.

A third remnant of the old “Whigs,” meeting in Baltimore in September 1856, appealed to the country to beware of “geographical parties,” adopted the nomination made by the Whig “Know-Nothings” of Ex-President Fillmore, and asserted that in Kansas “civil war” was “raging,” and that the Union was “in peril.” The contest was conducted by the Republicans at the North very much on the lines on which the first Whig victory of 1840 had been won—by the organisation, that is, of “Pathfinder Clubs” and processions, with brass bands, bonfires, and all the paraphernalia of “politics by picnic,” and a large popular vote was cast for the Republican candidate. But Mr. Buchanan, nevertheless had a majority of nearly 500,000 votes over Colonel Fremont at the polls in a total vote of about three millions, and he was elected President by 174 votes in the Electoral College, eight votes being cast by Maryland for Mr. Fillmore, and 114 votes being cast for Colonel Fremont, if the five votes of Wisconsin were properly included in that number—a very grave question as to that point being raised by the undisputed fact that the electoral votes of Wisconsin, which, under an obviously wise precept of the Constitution, ought to have been cast on the same day with the electoral votes of all the other States of the Union (December 3, 1856), were not cast until the next day (December 4) because the electors were prevented by a snowstorm from reaching the capital of the State in season to comply with the behest of the organic law.

Events moved rapidly after the election of President Buchanan. In spite of a great financial panic in 1857, the commerce of the United States, under the salutary régime established by Democratic Secretaries of the Treasury, advanced beyond all former precedent. The net imports of the United States increased from 298,261,364 dollars in 1856, the year of Mr. Buchanan’s election, to 335,233,232 dollars in 1860, the last year of his administration, and the exports from 310,586,330 dollars in 1856 to 373,189,274 dollars in 1860. The sea going tonnage of the Union ran up to that of Great Britain;[4] and never had the country been so prosperous as during this period of Democratic ascendancy and relative fiscal freedom.

But while the managers of the new sectional Republican party worked night and day to develop and consolidate their voting power at the North and West, and availed themselves skilfully of every exciting incident in the history of the day to fan the passions of the people into flame, a sharp conflict was raging within the Democratic ranks between the Administration and the followers of Senator Douglas, which the leaders of the disunion movement at the South carefully and skilfully fomented, and which culminated in an open secession from the Democratic National Convention at Charleston in April 1860.

The Convention was adjourned to meet at Baltimore in June. There a second secession of Southern delegates occurred, followed by the nomination for the Presidency of Senator Douglas. A few days later the seceders, meeting in a Convention of their own, nominated Vice-President Breckenridge of Kentucky. In the meantime on the 9th of May a convention of “moderate men” of all shades of opinion had assembled in Baltimore, and nominated two eminent members of the disbanded Whig party, Mr. Bell of Tennessee and Mr. Edward Everett of Massachusetts, for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency; while the now confident Republicans, gathered in Convention at Chicago on the 16th of May, had selected not Ex-Governor Seward of New York, but Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as their candidate.

Of course, with such a prospect of success before them as the Democratic disorganisation offered, the managers of this Convention of the Republicans adroitly threw all questions but the “burning questions” of the hour as far as possible into the background of their operations. But while they declared themselves in favor of the preservation of “the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States,” they did not forget to record their desire for such an “adjustment” of the “duties on imports” as “should encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country,” under which rather vague phraseology lay concealed the purpose of organising a new tariff for protection—a purpose which was carried into effect by the Republicans at Washington as soon as the subsequent secession from Congress of the Southern members made it practicable.

* * * * *

With the first election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and his inauguration in March, 1861, we come upon a sudden and complete “solution of continuity” in the political history of the United States. Of the total popular vote of the country, amounting to 4,680,193, thrown on the 4th of November, 1860, Mr. Lincoln received but 1,866,452, being thus left in a popular minority of no fewer than _two million, two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one votes_! It is impossible in the face of these figures to doubt that if the tremendous issue of peace and war between the two great sections of the Union, which really lay hidden in the ballot-boxes of the Union on that November day, had been never so dimly perceived by the American people, the verdict of the nation would have made an end that day of the new “Republican,” party. But neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor Mr. Seward, nor any considerable number of the Republican voters of the North and the West believed, or could be made to believe, in the reality of this issue. It came upon them all and upon the country at last, after all the agitation and all the warnings of years, like “a thief in the night,” and coming upon the country it suspended for four long and dismal years the normal action of the constitution, and the normal development therefore of public opinion through the channels of constitutional politics.

It is juggling with phrases to say that from the 5th of March, 1861, to the 15th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was, in any true sense of the words, a President of the United States with a political party at his back. He was to all intents and purposes a war dictator of the Northern and Western States, maintaining with all the resources of those sections of the country the fabric of the American Union against the armed and persistent efforts of thirteen sovereign States banded together in a confederacy to make an end of its authority and its existence so far as concerned its relations with them and with their inhabitants. To this colossal task Mr. Lincoln brought, as I think the most impartial critics of his administration in my own party now admit, most rare and remarkable gifts of character and of mind. It has been not uncommon among those who, since his death, have constituted themselves the special eulogists of this extraordinary man, to represent him as struggling from the first, not merely against the enormous difficulties arrayed in his path by the energy, and wealth, and determination of the seceding Confederacy, but against the ill-will and infidelity to his trust of the Democratic President whom Mr. Lincoln was elected by the North and the West to succeed. This is not the place for any vindication in this point of President Buchanan. He has had no lack of critics within the ranks of my own party. But no man who was present during that fateful winter of 1860-61 in Washington, and who was really conversant with men and things there, will need to be told that but for President Buchanan’s fidelity to his constitutional oath, and to the behest of the party which elected him in 1856 to “uphold the Union,” the Civil War would probably have begun in Washington itself before Mr. Lincoln set foot within the capital.

On the day of Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, a day never to be forgotten by any American who witnessed the scene, it was the presence by the side of Mr. Lincoln of his great Northern Democratic rival, Senator Douglas, which more than all the bayonets of the troops assembled for the protection of Washington by General Scott, under orders from President Buchanan, convinced the most intelligent of the Southern men that the Union was not to be dissolved like snow in the sunbeams, and gave all the weight of the Democratic masses of the North and West to the new President’s deliberate declaration that the forts and property of the United States would be “held and occupied” by all the power of the unseceded States.

The one member of Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet who from the beginning foresaw the gravity of the impending contest, and who put the whole pressure of his personal influence upon the new President almost to the extent of compelling him into asserting his authority by force of arms, was not the Whig who had organised the “Republican” party, Mr. Seward, It was Mr. Montgomery Blair, a “Democrat” by training, the son of the confidential adviser of President Jackson and the brother of a Democratic general in the Union armies who was afterwards nominated for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Seymour of New York in 1868 by the Democratic party. Mr. Montgomery Blair himself left Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet in July 1864, escaped the war made by the “Republican” party under Sumner and Stevens upon the friends of President Lincoln, after the assassination of the President by a melodramatic madman, and became a trusty ally of Governor Tilden of New York, the Democratic candidate who was elected to the Presidency of the United States in 1876 by a popular majority of nearly 300,000 votes in a total poll of a little over 8,000,000, and by a majority of one vote in the electoral colleges, only to be defrauded of his office by the audacious tampering of a cabal of Republican office-holders with the votes of three Southern States.

It is not my purpose, and it would swell this paper beyond all reasonable limits, to sketch here, even in outline, the political annals of the quarter of a century which stretches now between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the election of Governor Cleveland in 1884. I may assume my readers to have a general knowledge of the main features of this period of American history. No intelligent man can be familiar even with the distorted and partial presentation of those features which has hitherto passed current on both sides of the Atlantic, without asking himself what the magic virtue can be which has carried the great Democratic party of the United States steadily onward through so many years of exclusion from executive power and such storms of systematic obloquy, enabling it amid the passions of a fierce sectional conflict to retain such a popular support throughout the North and West as has persistently threatened the tenure of the Federal authority by its all-powerful and never over-scrupulous opponents, giving it again and again control of the popular branch of the Federal Congress, and commanding for it, as soon as the restoration of the Union became in truth an accomplished fact, an unquestioned majority of the suffrages of the American people.

My object has been to indicate the true answer to this question by setting forth the foundations on which the Democratic party of the United States was planted by its great leaders in the very dawn of our national history.