150 years ago: The election of Abraham Lincoln touches off secession crisis

[Hannah Bell]

On November 5, 1860, one day after voters of the United States elected Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president, South Carolina began preparations to secede from the union. Other Southern states soon followed, leading within little over five months to the outbreak of the American Civil War...



Confederate flag raised over Ft. Sumter

Lincoln came to national prominence in 1858, when he ran as the Republican candidate for the Illinois Senate against Douglas. A series of debates with Douglas attracted large audiences...

Lincoln at this point did not advocate social equality for blacks. Still, his views were in advance of majority opinion of the time. He held that Thomas Jefferson’s insistence that “all men are created equal” contained in the Declaration of Independence, applied to blacks as well as whites.

“The negro is included in the word ‘men’ used in the Declaration,” he declared. This “is the great fundamental principle on which our free institutions rest.” He continued, “In the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglass, and he is the equal of every living man.”

It was Lincoln’s unequivocal insistence that the principles elaborated by Jefferson applied equally to all that won the undying enmity of the Southern planters. They were not satisfied with Lincoln’s pledge that he would not interfere with slavery. The South demanded that slavery be declared a positive good.

In his famous 1860 address at Cooper Union in New York... Lincoln, rhetorically addressing the South, declared...“What will satisfy (the South)..? This and only this: cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words.”



At Cooper Union

The Republican convention met in May in Chicago... New York Governor Seward expected to win on the first ballot. However... Opponents of Seward launched an effort to block his victory on the first ballot... The Chicago Tribune launched an all out editorial campaign in support of Illinois native Lincoln, whose humble origin...stood out in sharp contrast to Seward, who was identified with eastern banking interests.

On the first ballot Seward failed to achieve a majority...winning 173 ½ votes to Lincoln’s 102... Lincoln’s total rose to 181 on the second ballot. Lincoln then obtained a majority on the third ballot...

The Republican platform called for a ban on slavery in the territories. It also appealed to small farmers, with a plank calling for passage of a homestead law, giving free land to anyone willing to work it.

While antislavery forces united behind Lincoln, the slavery question split the Democratic Party along sectional lines. Southern Democrats walked out of the April nominating convention when they were unable to impose...the demand that slavery be permitted in the territories... The Douglas Democrats were not prepared to go that far, holding to the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

The Democrats reassembled in Baltimore in June, where Northern delegates nominated Douglas with a simple majority.

Southern delegates again walked out; this time they held their own convention in Richmond, Virginia where they nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, vice president in the administration of James Buchanan.

The presidential campaign of 1860 was the most polarized and tense in American history.

In the North, the contest was between Douglas and Lincoln; in the South, between Bell and Breckinridge. The Republicans did not even attempt to field a ticket in 10 Southern states, where their speakers would have likely faced physical attack.

When, early in the campaign it became apparent that the split in the Democratic Party would probably result in the election of Lincoln, near hysteria gripped large areas of the South. The press spread rumors of abolitionist plots to arm slaves. Those suspected of Northern sympathies were hounded and even lynched.

In the final poling Lincoln won a plurality of 40 percent of the popular vote. He carried every free state except New Jersey. This translated into a comfortable victory in the Electoral College, because of its winner take all system of apportionment.

Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, to 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell and just 12 for Douglas, who, despite his poor showing in the electoral college, came in second in the popular vote, polling 1.3 million votes to Lincoln’s 1.8 million.

The day after the election the South Carolina state legislature, called into special session by the governor, voted to set December 17 as the date for a special convention to consider secession...
Following a unanimous vote for secession on December 20, South Carolina called on other southern states to join it in the formation of a “great slaveholding confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses.”

In moving to break up the union the South carried out what noted Civil War historian James McPherson...called a “pre-emptive counterrevolution..."

"Rather than trying to destroy the old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize.”

In other words, sensing that the tide of historical development was moving against it, the southern planter aristocracy chose to instigate civil war rather than accept any restrictions on slavery, the source of its power and wealth. It would not be the last attempt by a retrograde social order to employ violence in order to evade the verdict of history...

The war provoked by the South only hastened the collapse of the slave system. While initially waged by the North as a war to preserve the union, it became transformed, in the words of Lincoln, into “a remorseless revolutionary struggle, ” resulting in one of the greatest and most rapid overturns of private property in history.

It ended with the liberation of four million slaves, worth some $3 billion at the time, over $1 trillion dollars in today’s terms.

Karl Marx wrote, “Never has such a gigantic transformation taken place so rapidly."

The Sesquicentennial of the election of 1860 is being observed at a time when American society is perhaps more sharply polarized than at any time since the period prior to the Civil War. If anything, the blindness, greed and rapaciousness of the American and global financial aristocracy puts into the shade the old southern slavocracy.

The system of capitalist wage slavery is threatening mankind with ever greater poverty, environmental disaster and catastrophic wars. The yoke of private ownership of the means of production is strangling the productive forces of mankind.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/1860-d24.shtml

[AsahinaKimi]

1. Honest Abe!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdy3orO6tQA

Interesting post btw..:thumbsup:

[tkmorris]

2. Teabaggers in the Old South

Good read there Hannah, thanks.

[freshwest]

3. Very good find. On the other side of the equation was this:

From his Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861, Savannah, Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens (Vice President of the Confederate States) speaking on the foundational ideals of the Confederate constitution:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.

This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.

Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split."

He was right.

<...>The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day.

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.

They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.

This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day.

The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.

All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. <...>

They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

In the conflict thus far, success has been on our side, complete throughout the length and breadth of the Confederate States.

It is upon this, as I have stated, our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.


http://teachingamericanhi...ry/index.asp?document=76

[freshwest]

4. My further thoughts, based on my post above, and Hannah's

For me the issue is the belief systems. As the CSA VP said, the CSA was not based on the premise most liberals believe most fervently:

All people are created equal, no exceptions.

This is one of the most astounding ideals in the history of the planet for some time. Kings and dictators decide who will live and who will die, with no one above them. According to their will. And who will live lives of servitude, rape and abuse.

That ideal that people have inalienable rights and each one should be treated as equals under the law has been pushed to the limit in the USA and the West, crossing many religious, social  and class lines, and other lines never imagined.

There is a conservative commentator from India who says that possibly the one gift the British and the west left of value was the notion people shouldn't automatically have their destiny decreed by the accident of their birth, despite the caste system largely being intact. He said it was a revolutionary ideal that many places in the world have not yet grasped. Apparently, some people in this country have still not grasped this idea.

The idea that human rights are not given by a corporation, boss, city, country, religion, anyone or anything, is the premise that the right does not and will never agree. They feel no sense of divine purpose being validated when lesser or minor groups are brought up to higher level, no reason for rejoicing, only disgust. They totally deny the humanity of other humans and they carry that through to all of nature.

They have a way of looking at the rest of humanity that puzzles liberals. Liberals believe that they have found a great notion and it is a universal good. That people who feel, right or wrong, that ending slavery was worth dying for. That liberating Europe or fighting for this country in WW2 was worth dying for.

That going into the WTC and dying for people who weren't the same in all the ways we hassle about in so many places, was normal human behavior. They didn't take the time to determine if they might be deviants, worship the wrong god, or no god, or be illegal aliens and thus not worth saving.

The policeman and firefighters didn't ask their race, who they slept with, what god they worshipped, or how much money they had or what their politics were, or if they had paid their fees and their taxes, or if they were disabled or in some way a burden on society.

Are all humans equal? Do they all deserve the same rights and care as human beings as those who have more power, education, money? Does god see them differently, see one group as the natural master of the other, superior, chosen, better?

The VP in the OP definitely felt that civilization agreed with him. As far as I am concerned, this is the issue that we can decide, or let the country go to hell.

[Cirque du So-What]

5. 'It would not be the last attempt by a retrograde social order...

...to employ violence in order to evade the verdict of history...'

I would certainly classify the capitalist wage-slave construct as a 'retrograde social order,' and I believe it is within the realm of possibility that those at the apex of this pyramid scheme would instigate wars to protect their power and wealth. Can the invasion and occupation of Iraq be characterized as anything other than an oil grab? Of what consequence to these vultures are the lives of 30-40 million Iraqis or the lives of thousands of American youth squandered in this venture? None!

[SpiralHawk]

6. The Republicon Platform was totally Communist

Why can't the Republicons tell the truth once in a while?

"The Republican platform ... also appealed to small farmers, with a plank calling for passage of a homestead law, giving free land to anyone willing to work it."

[Selatius]

7. Imagine if the government confiscated over 1 trillion dollars in corrupt banker assets today.

If the government had nationalized thoroughly and completely the whole institutions of banks that sit on Wall Street in the wake of the financial collapse and opened up every book they had, either the people would be outraged to the point of striking at the bankers, or the bankers would pre-emptively attack fomenting violence and potentially war on the government.

[GeorgeGist]

8. A pragmatist would have seen that enslaving the South ...

would lead to hypocrisy in the long run.

[no_hypocrisy]

9. Did the southern states that seceded intend to annex territories themselves and make them

slave states? Did The Confederacy ask for sovereign recognition by other countries and did any country recognize it as an independent nation?L

[KharmaTrain]

10. And This Is Still Debated Today???

History is never black and white...the lead up to the Civil War was no exception. It's amazing to see the rising (or maybe just latent and now coming to the fore during these racist times) revisionism about this war and its causes.

While it is true that Lincoln didn't favor abolishing slavery the fact that he was willing to talk about a country without it was as anethema to the right wing then and still is today. So what was the "state" right they coveted so dearly? Nuff said....