Election of 1860, Secession & Fort Sumter — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Seven debates in Illinois

Lincoln opened the 1858 campaign by saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand and that the country would become all one thing or all the other. Douglas answered that the country had lived half slave and half free for seventy years, since the Constitution was written in 1787, and could continue indefinitely if each place decided for itself.

At Freeport, Lincoln asked the question that cost Douglas the presidency. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 had just held that Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; could the settlers of a territory therefore exclude it, as popular sovereignty promised? Douglas said yes in effect, because slavery needed local police regulations to survive and a legislature could simply decline to pass them.

That answer, the Freeport Doctrine, was honest and fatal. It satisfied Illinois and enraged the South, which heard a man explaining how to nullify a Supreme Court ruling they had just won. Two years later it helped split his party.

Note what Lincoln was and was not saying. He opposed the extension of slavery and called it a moral wrong, and he also said at Charleston that he was not in favour of social and political equality between the races, a statement his admirers have been uncomfortable with ever since. He was running in Illinois in 1858, and reading him as a finished abolitionist flattens a man who moved a great deal in the next seven years.

Lincoln lost. Senators were chosen by state legislatures then, not by voters, and the Democrats held enough seats. But the debates were reprinted across the country and he published them as a book in 1860, which is how a one-term congressman became a plausible nominee.

Part 2 · Harpers Ferry

Brown had come out of Kansas with a plan: seize the federal arsenal in Virginia, distribute the weapons, and build a force in the mountains that enslaved people could join. He raised money from New England backers, recruited twenty-one men including five Black men and three of his sons, and attacked on 16 October 1859.

It went wrong at once. Nobody rose to join him, the raiders were surrounded in an engine house, and a detachment of marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee took the building in three minutes. Ten raiders died, including two of Brown's sons. Brown was tried for treason against Virginia, convicted, and hanged on 2 December.

His conduct at the trial changed everything. Wounded and calm, he told the court that if it was thought necessary that he should forfeit his life for the furtherance of justice and mingle his blood with the blood of millions in this slave country, let it be done. Emerson compared him to a saint; church bells rang in parts of New England on the day he died; and Thoreau defended him in print.

Southern readers saw northern crowds mourning a man who had tried to arm their slaves and drew the obvious conclusion, whether or not it was fair. Most northerners condemned the raid, and the Republican Party disavowed it immediately, but the funeral bells were what got reported in Richmond. Militia companies formed across the South through 1860, which meant that when war came the Confederacy already had the beginnings of an army.

Part 3 · Four candidates, one winner

The Democratic convention met in Charleston in April 1860 and broke apart over whether the party platform should guarantee slavery in the territories. Northern Democrats nominated Douglas; southern Democrats walked out and nominated John C. Breckinridge. A fourth group of former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party behind John Bell on the platform that the Constitution should simply be obeyed and the subject dropped.

The Republicans met in Chicago and passed over better-known men for Lincoln, partly because he had made fewer enemies and partly because he could carry the lower North. His name did not appear on the ballot in ten southern states.

The result: Lincoln 1.87 million votes, about 39.8 per cent, and 180 electoral votes. Douglas came second in popular votes with about 29.5 per cent and won exactly one state, Missouri. Breckinridge took the Deep South, Bell took three border states.

The arithmetic is worth doing carefully, because the common claim that the split elected Lincoln is only half right. Even if every vote for Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell had gone to one candidate, Lincoln's margins in the populous northern states were large enough to give him an electoral majority anyway. The split mattered less to the outcome than to the legitimacy of it: a president chosen by under 40 per cent, with nothing in the South, was easy to describe as a sectional ruler imposed on an unwilling region.

Part 4 · Secession, and what the documents say

South Carolina's convention voted to leave on 20 December 1860. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed by 1 February 1861, and delegates formed the Confederate States of America at Montgomery that month, electing Jefferson Davis president. All of this happened before Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March.

Several of those states published declarations of the causes of secession, and the historian's job here is easy because they were not shy. Mississippi's begins by saying its position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. Texas listed the free states' refusal to return fugitives. South Carolina's complaint was almost entirely about northern states nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act.

This matters because a different explanation became popular afterwards. From the 1870s a version took hold in which the war had been about states' rights and tariffs rather than slavery, and it is still repeated. The test is straightforward: read what the seceding states said at the time, when they were trying to persuade each other rather than defend themselves to posterity, and compare it with what their defenders said thirty years later.

Fort Sumter sat in Charleston harbour, held by a small federal garrison running out of food. Lincoln notified South Carolina that he was sending provisions and no weapons, which left the Confederacy choosing between allowing a federal fort to be resupplied or firing first. Batteries opened on 12 April 1861 and the fort surrendered after thirty-four hours with nobody killed in the bombardment. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, which had refused to secede over the election, left rather than furnish troops against other southern states.