Lincoln and the Border States

Preserving the Union

William C. Harris

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780700620562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Adopting a new approach to an American icon, an award-winning scholar reexamines the life of Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate how his remarkable political acumen and leadership skills evolved during the intense partisan conflict in pre-Civil War Illinois. By describing Lincoln's rise from obscurity to the presidency, William Harris shows that Lincoln's road to political success was far from eas—and that his reaction to events wasn't always wise or his racial attitudes free of prejudice.Although most scholars have labeled Lincoln a moderate, Harris reveals that he was by his own admission a conservative who revered the Founders and advocated "adherence to the old and tried." By emphasizing the conservative bent that guided Lincoln's political evolution—his background as a Henry Clay Whig, his rural ties, his cautious nature, and the racial and political realities of central Illinois—Harris provides fresh insight into Lincoln's political ideas and activities and portrays him as morally opposed to slavery but fundamentally conservative in his political strategy against it.Interweaving aspects of Lincoln's life and character that were an integral part of his rise to prominence, Harris provides in-depth coverage of Lincoln's controversial term in Congress, his re-emergence as the leader of the antislavery coalition in Illinois, and his Senate campaign against Stephen A.Douglas. He particularly describes how Lincoln organized the antislavery coalition into the Republican Party while retaining the support of its diverse elements, and sheds new light on Lincoln's ongoing efforts to bring Know Nothing nativists into the coalition without alienating ethnic groups. He also provides new information and analysis regarding Lincoln's nomination and election to the presidency, the selection of his cabinet, and his important role as president-elect during the secession crisis of 1860-1861.Challenging prevailing views, Harris portrays Lincoln as increasingly driven not so much by his own ambitions as by his antislavery sentiments and his fear for the republic in the hands of Douglas Democrats, and he shows how the unique political skills Lincoln developed in Illinois shaped his wartime leadership abilities. By doing so, he opens a window on his political ideas and influences and offers a fresh understanding of this complex figure.

CHAPTER 1

The Border States and Lincoln’s Election

Abraham Lincoln was a product of the border country between the North and the South, first as a small child in middle Kentucky, then during his youth and early adulthood in southern Indiana and central Illinois. He lived in communities populated overwhelmingly by settlers from the upper South and the border slave states. As a young man in New Salem, Illinois, Lincoln aligned with the Whig Party of Kentuckian Henry Clay and read the conservative Louisville Daily Journal, the Whig newspaper organ of the region. The Journal, edited by George D. Prentice, wielded considerable influence in Kentucky and adjacent states, and it would continue to do so into the Civil War.

Most of Lincoln’s associates in his rise to prominence were Whigs and natives of the border states, especially Kentucky. These included his three law partners, John Todd Stuart, Stephen T. Logan, and William H. Herndon, and Circuit Judge David Davis, Orville H. Browning, and Richard Yates. They also included Mary Todd Lincoln’s family in Springfield and Lexington, and Joshua Speed, Lincoln’s closest friend, who lived most of his life on his large family farm near Louisville and only resided in Springfield for a few years. Lincoln spoke in the Kentucky vernacular, and his legendary sense of humor reflected a rural idiom that flourished during the early nineteenth century throughout the Mississippi-Ohio Valley. His father, Thomas, handed down to his son an appreciation for the backcountry humor of the region.

As a Whig in Illinois, where his party was usually in the minority, Lincoln’s political instincts inclined him toward a conservative position on issues, including slavery. Nonetheless, he was influenced in his political views by the influx of antislavery Whigs in the northern part of the state and also by his opposition to Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas’s popular sovereignty provision in the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The bill, enacted in 1854, opened the door for slavery’s expansion into the territories, particularly the Kansas Territory, where proslavery Missourians sought to control the voters’ decision on slavery. Lincoln emerged as the leader of an antislavery coalition in Illinois that opposed the expansion of slavery, but, as a constitutional and political necessity, he recognized the institution in the states where it existed. By 1856 the Lincoln-led coalition had become the state Republican Party. Lincoln had cleverly advanced a conservative antislavery political strategy that he calculated could win the critical central counties of Illinois, even though border state and other southern transplants dominated local politics in those counties. These counties had traditionally favored the Democratic Party of Senator Douglas.

A conservative approach to ending slavery, Lincoln believed, would also appeal to diverse political elements throughout the state, such as nativist Whigs, dubbed “Know Nothings” because of their refusal to divulge the contents of their secret meetings. Paradoxically, the Know Nothings, while calling for restrictions on immigrant naturalization and voting, tended to oppose slavery, partly because their Democratic adversaries defended it. Despite his dislike of nativism, Lincoln avoided public attacks on the Know Nothings, many of whom had formerly associated with him in the Whig Party and were strong in the border states.

During the 1850s, Lincoln proclaimed the immorality of slavery, while opposing its expansion. His position sharply contrasted with Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine and “care not” attitude toward slavery, which, Lincoln repeatedly charged, would perpetuate the institution. Lincoln insisted that his approach would place slavery en route to “ultimate extinction,” a course that he argued had been sanctioned by the Founding Fathers. True to his conservative instincts and his Kentucky and southern Indiana origins, Lincoln rejected any federal action against slavery in the South. Indeed, he went so far as to support the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law that the radical antislavery advocates vehemently opposed. Unlike many radicals and immediate abolitionists, Lincoln also refused to label slaveholders as evil people, and he denied that he had any “prejudice against the Southern people.” “They are just what we would be in their situation,” he declared at Peoria in October 1854. “If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.”¹

Lincoln hoped that the inhabitants of border states, particularly old Whigs like the prominent Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden, would understand his position on slavery and would reject the inflammatory anti-Republican rhetoric of the Democrats and ultraconservatives in both the North and the South. But this did not happen. Like other southerners, border state political leaders saw little difference between Lincoln’s antislavery position and that of radicals like William H. Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase. Lincoln’s House Divided speech, which launched his 1858 senatorial campaign against Douglas, contributed mightily—and mistakenly—to the border state belief that he was a radical who favored direct northern action against slavery in the South. Crittenden, Henry Clay’s heir as a Whig leader, encouraged his Illinois friends to support his old Democratic enemy in the election; he viewed Douglas as less threatening to sectional peace. After losing the election, Lincoln wrote Crittenden expressing his mortification that the use of Crittenden’s name against him among old Whigs had contributed to his defeat.²

Border state leaders played an even more active role against Lincoln and the Republicans in the presidential campaign of 1860. Most border state Democrats, who opposed Douglas’s candidacy because of his refusal to endorse slavery’s rights in the territories, threw their support behind Southern Rights Democratic nominee John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Douglas, however, retained the loyalty of Missouri Democrats. Border region Whigs, including Senator Crittenden, fearful of the sectional consequences of a Republican triumph and unwilling to support either Democratic candidate, provided the leadership for the formation of the Constitutional Union Party. They nominated Senator John Bell of Tennessee for president on a platform that ignored the slavery issue and appealed to voters on the sole issues of support for the Constitution and the Union. They hoped to win enough conservative upper South, border state, and lower North electoral votes to throw the presidential election into the House of Representatives. There, each state had one vote, and Bell’s chances for election, they believed, would be good.

But the Republicans, meeting in Chicago, dealt a serious blow to the Constitutional Unionists’ strategy. Republicans rejected the reputedly radical Seward and nominated Lincoln on a conservative, albeit antislavery, platform designed to win the key states of the lower North. Lincoln could have written the platform, whose key plank was that there should be no expansion of slavery. The Louisville Daily Courier, the most influential southern rights newspaper in Kentucky, wasted no time in denouncing Lincoln and predicting that the election of the “Black Republican” candidate would result in a breakup of the Union and civil war. In a long editorial on May 26, the Courier announced, “The mind shrinks” from contemplation “of the triumph of the party of which Mr. Lincoln is the representative and leader.” The editor argued, “Lincoln’s doctrines are the most subtle and dangerous form of anti-slaveryism,” even though Lincoln did not advance the whole cloth of abolitionism. Lincoln, the Courier editor told Kentuckians, had supported Senator Seward’s radical pronouncement of an “irrepressible conflict” between the North and the South. Furthermore, the editor reminded his readers that Lincoln had preached the pure and alarming doctrine that “slavery is an evil.” He professed to know of no winnable arguments with which to oppose Lincoln and the Republicans “except to strike at the very foundation of the whole superstructure of fraud and delusion [that] anti-slaveryism has erected.” The editor, along with other border state Democrats, rejected the controversial Douglas as the man to lead an Armageddon campaign against Lincoln and the “Black Republicans.” “To nominate Douglas,” he contended, “is at once and in advance to give up the fight” to defeat the Republicans.³

The Courier editor and southern rights activists insisted that Breckinridge was the only candidate who could win enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where a victory over Lincoln was possible. With some exceptions, southern rights advocates in the border states denied that they supported secession if the “Black Republican” (Lincoln) won the election. Even Breckinridge rejected the charge that he was a disunionist. In a long speech at Ashland, Kentucky, he repeatedly affirmed his devotion to the Union, but with the usual qualifications that northerners should faithfully uphold the constitutional rights of southerners regarding slavery and check the abolitionist assault on the institution.

The Louisville Daily Journal, whose principal editor was still George D. Prentice, gave its readers a less ominous view of Lincoln’s nomination than did the Courier. Nonetheless, it predicted that the Illinois Republican’s election would seriously divide the nation and lead to terrible consequences. “We have a favorable opinion of the personal and even the political integrity of Abraham Lincoln,” the Journal declared. “But he is, as the whole nation knows, a sectional candidate and only a sectional candidate.” The editor reminded its readers of Lincoln’s House Divided speech of 1858, and he repeated the misleading claim that it expressed the same “irrepressible conflict” and “higher law” doctrines put forth by Senator Seward. “There is reason to believe that Mr. Lincoln still entertains the views to which he gave such vehement utterance in 1858, and that they have probably been strengthened and rendered even more violent since by the wild and powerful and raging partisan influences by which he is now continually surrounded.” The Journal called upon “the conservative men of the North …to ponder deeply” the disastrous implications of Republican control of the government and to “use every honorable means and patriotic exertion to prevent the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States.”⁴

Prentice, Crittenden, and other Kentucky conservatives believed that the key to preventing a Lincoln victory lay in neighboring Indiana. They focused their attention on securing an anti-Republican fusion in the state. At the same time, they had some hopes for a similar movement in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, where Douglas Democrats and Know Nothing Whigs, if combined, could conceivably, though not probably, defeat the Republicans. (Indiana actually had more electoral votes in 1860 than Illinois.) The fusionist success in Indiana depended on gaining the support of the former Whigs in the Know Nothing movement who had cast their ballots for Millard Fillmore, the American Party candidate, in 1856. The Fillmore vote had cost the Republicans the presidential election in the swing states of Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Lincoln also recognized that a major threat to his success in 1860 was the border-state-backed effort to arrange an anti-Republican fusion strategy in Pennsylvania as well as in Indiana; Lincoln believed his home state was safe for the Republicans. The October gubernatorial elections in Indiana and, to a lesser extent, Pennsylvania, as Lincoln and others correctly assumed, would foretell the winner of the presidential contest in November.

During the campaign, Crittenden and Kentucky conservatives bombarded Indiana with speeches, printed addresses, and editorials arguing for anti-Republican fusion tickets in both the gubernatorial and presidential elections. Speaking at Louisville on August 2 and echoing the views of Prentice’s Louisville Daily Journal, Crittenden told his friends across the Ohio River, “Mr. Lincoln may be a very worthy, upright and honest man,” but if elected president, “he must be governed by the political influence and voice of his party. Mr. Lincoln is at the head of the great anti-slavery party, a purely sectional party, which, according to all its antecedents, threatens the existence of slavery everywhere.” His election, Crittenden warned, “would be, therefore, a great calamity to the country, though he never should do an act positively offensive or injurious to any interest of the country.”⁵

To counter the fusionist threat in Indiana, Lincoln dispatched his secretary, John G. Nicolay, to meet secretly with Richard W. Thompson, the leader of the state’s Know Nothing Party, and seek his support against the movement. Thompson, an old Whig, had served with Lincoln in Congress during the late 1840s, and despite his proslavery leanings, he promised Lincoln that he would oppose fusion with the Douglas Democrats. Thompson told Lincoln that his “primary object was to beat the Democracy by holding off” Know Nothing opposition “in the doubtful northern states.”⁶ When the Indiana State Constitutional Union convention met in August, consisting mainly of Know Nothings, the delegates heard a rousing speech for fusion by former Know Nothing governor Charles S. Morehead of Kentucky. Like Thompson, Morehead had been a Whig colleague of Lincoln in Congress, but in 1860 Morehead viewed Lincoln as a threat to the Union and to slavery (Morehead owned a plantation in Mississippi). The Constitutional Union delegates, however, followed Thompson’s lead and refused to merge their John Bell electoral ticket with Douglas’s. Then, five days before the critical October 9 gubernatorial election, Thompson, irritated by the repeated interference of Kentuckians in the campaign, issued a printed circular, To the Conservative Men of Indiana, announcing that he would vote not only for Lincoln but also for the Republican candidate for governor, Henry S. Lane.⁷ Thompson’s support for the Republicans among conservatives, combined with divisions in the Indiana Democratic Party between Douglas and Breckinridge supporters, produced a victory in Indiana for Lane in October and for Lincoln in November.

Border state pressure on Know Nothings and conservative Whigs in Illinois and Pennsylvania was not as great as that in Indiana. Lincoln’s presence on the presidential ticket deflated much of the opposition to the antislavery Republicans among conservative elements in his home state. Still, diehard conservatives of border state Whig antecedents formed a National Union Party and nominated John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s political mentor and first law partner, as their candidate for governor in November. However, they rejected fusion with Douglas Democrats, their old political enemies, in the presidential election. Stuart came in third to Republican Richard Yates in the gubernatorial election; Lincoln easily won the state.⁸

John J. Crittenden, U.S. senator and representative of Kentucky. Political heir of Henry Clay and conservative Union leader in the border states who unsuccessfully sought a compromise to restore the Union, he opposed Lincoln’s antislavery policies. Crittenden’s death in 1863 removed an important border state leader in Congress. Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum of Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee.

In Pennsylvania, political rivalries also prevented a fusion of the Know Nothings with the Democrats, despite the warnings of Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia conservatives that a sectional crisis and perhaps civil war would follow the election of Lincoln. On the eve of the election, Prentice made a passionate appeal in the Louisville Daily Journal for northerners to reject both Lincoln and Breckinridge. He cried out, “Men of the American Union, if you would have your consciences and your names free from the ineffaceable and damning stain of liberticide, defeat the Republican candidate for the Presidency together with his Seceding accomplice [Breckinridge], and bury the two in one common pit of ruin and shame.”⁹

Prentice’s plea fell on deaf ears, despite a late desperate effort to arrange an anti-Lincoln fusion in New York. The election returns demonstrated clearly that the Constitutional Union–border state strategy to defeat the Republicans had failed. Lincoln swept the northern states except for New Jersey, where he had to share the electoral votes with Douglas. The Constitutional Union Party won only Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Breckinridge captured two border states, Maryland and Delaware, and also the other slave states except for Missouri, which was carried by Douglas. Lincoln only polled 26,390 votes in the four border states. Missourians cast 17,028 of those, mainly in Saint Louis, where there was a relatively large antislavery German American population. He won 1,364 votes in Kentucky and 2,294 in Maryland. The Dover Delawarean reflected the sentiment in the border states, as well as that of many future historians, when it concluded that Lincoln’s victory could be attributed to nothing less than the “folly of his enemies” in their fail...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Border States and Lincoln’s Election
• 2. After Fort Sumter: Crisis in Maryland
• 3. Kentucky: Experiment in Neutrality
• 4. Missouri: A State in Turmoil
• 5. Lincoln’s Emancipation Initiatives and the Border States
• 6. The Struggle over Emancipation
• 7. Resistance in Kentucky, 1863–1865
• 8. Union and Emancipation Triumphant: Maryland
• 9. Union and Emancipation Triumphant: Missouri
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover