Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

“fusion” and Know-Nothing groups who lined up behind the Republicans, it was clearly dwarfed by the central position that economic opposition to slavery and the extension of slavery into the territories came to have for the Republicans.

The great danger in this was that by the mid-1850s, an anti-slavery party was most likely to be an almost entirely Northern party, devoted to expressing Northern opinions and representing Northern interests. The Whigs had at least been a national party that labored to reduce sectional strife by inducing its Northern and Southern members to cooperate and compromise in the service of larger national goals. But the time for compromises between Northerners and Southerners was fast slipping away, and the Republicans had as their goal the abolition of an institution that Southerners regarded as non-negotiable. And with the death of the Whigs, one of the principal means for binding the sections of the fragile Union disappeared.

The same fate nearly overtook the Democrats. President Pierce, who had supported Kansas-Nebraska, was denounced with Douglas as a traitor by the Northern Democrats and as halfhearted by the Southern Democrats, and Democratic candidates who pledged to support their party’s president were mowed down in the congressional elections in 1854. Of the ninety-one seats held by Democrats in the House of Representatives in 1854, sixty-six of them were lost in the fall congressional elections that year; only seven of the Democrats who had voted for Kansas-Nebraska survived in office.58 When the Democratic presidential convention met in Cincinnati in 1856, the fearful Democrats jettisoned Pierce and rejected Douglas as their presidential candidate, and on the eighteenth ballot they nominated a Pennsylvania Democrat, James Buchanan.

Buchanan was a veteran Democratic politician who had long coveted a presidential nomination. In 1856 his chief political merit lay in the fact that he had been out of the country as American minister to Great Britain during the Kansas-Nebraska debates and so had avoided taking any side publicly. Buchanan was also a Northerner (to reassure the Northern Democrats), but one with many friends in the South (to reassure the Southern Democrats). So by nominating a party machine man who had no well-known opinions on the crying issues of the moment, the Democrats managed to avoid a North-South split.

With the old Whig Party in shambles and the Republican Party still only two years old, Buchanan’s victory in the 1856 election was a foregone conclusion for most observers. Even under those circumstances, the Republicans pulled off what struck pro-slavery people as an alarmingly good show at the polls. Nominating a celebrity explorer, John Charles Frémont, for president, the Republicans scooped up a third of the nation’s votes, virtually all of them from the North, where voters turned out in record numbers.59 As many Southerners quickly realized, had the anti-slavery Northern Democrats not been mollified by Buchanan’s nomination, they might have bolted to the Republicans and handed them the election on the first try, just on the strength of Northern votes alone. The next time around, the Democrats might not be so fortunate.

The political parties were not the only national institutions cracking under the strain of sectional controversy. The Protestant churches, which had for many years been yet another source of union within the Union, were also splitting under the stress of Southern threats and demands for assurance. Part of the strain was caused by the South’s unceasing search for arguments in defense of slavery. Once slavery was being defended as a “positive good,” it was only a matter of time before Southerners appealed to the Bible to show that it was a moral good as well, and had divine approval. “We assert that the Bible teaches that the relation of master and slave is perfectly lawful and right,” declared the Presbyterian Robert Lewis Dabney; from a litany of Old Testament and New Testament examples, from Abraham to St. Paul, Dabney concluded that slavery “was appointed by God as the punishment of, and remedy for … the peculiar moral degradation of a part of the [human] race.”60

When Southern divines offered these arguments, Northern evangelicals were quick to correct them, at first patiently and then angrily, as Southerners responded with accusations of apostasy and unbelief. By 1850, the year of the Compromise, one Southern Presbyterian’s temper had frayed to the point where he denounced his Northern counterparts in terms fit for the Devil: “The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.”

On that other side, the greatest of the American Presbyterian theologians, Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary, at first condemned the abolitionists as troublemakers in the 1830s but then turned to accuse the South of the troublemaking; he joined the Republicans in 1856 and voted for Frémont.61 With antagonisms of this order dividing the theologians, it was only a little time before they divided the churches as well. The Methodists split into Northern and Southern branches in 1844; in 1845 the Baptists also split; and in 1857 the Southern presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church simply walked out of the Presbyterian General Assembly, taking with them some 15,000 Southern members. These church splits were significant not only because they helped destroy vital national institutions and turn them into sectional ones but also because (as John Calhoun happily pointed out in his last speech) they demonstrated that secession could occur. The church separations provided an illusory guarantee to Southerners that, if matters warranted, secession from the Union was an easy, profitable, and moral way of putting an end to the strife over slavery.62

Stephen A. Douglas, however, was unconvinced that matters ever needed to come to that point. Douglas had managed to survive much of the wreckage that his policies had caused, and although he once remarked that he could have traveled from Massachusetts to Illinois by the light of fires kindled to burn him in effigy, once he was back in Illinois he was able to