36

RESULT OF THE ELECTION.

CHAPTER II.

PRELIMINARY REBELLIOUS MOVEMENTS.

HE choice of Presidential electors, by ballot, occurred on the 6th of November, 1860. They were three hundred and three in number, and, when assembled in Electoral College,' one hundred and eighty of them voted for Mr. Lincoln, giving him one hundred and twenty-three more than all of his opponents received. Of the popular votes, numbering 4,680,193, he received 1,866,452. Although he had a large majority over each candidate, he received 979,163 less than did all of his opponents. This ct, and the circumstance that in nine Slave-labor States there was no Republican electoral ticket, gave factitious vigor to the plausible cry, which was immediately raised by the conspirators and their friends, that the President elect would be a usurper when in office, because he had not received a majority of the aggregate vote of the people; that he would be a sectional ruler, and, of necessity, a tyrant; and that his antecedents, the principles of the Republican platform, and the fanaticism of his supporters, pledged him to wage relentless war upon the system of Slavery, and the rights of the Slave-labor States.

It was not denied that Mr. Lincoln had been elected in accordance with the letter and spirit of the National Constitution, and that it was the fault of the politicians in the nine States that there were no electoral tickets therein. Many of these politicians began at once, with intense zeal, which often amounted to ferocity, to put in motion a system of terrorism, in which the hangman's rope, the incendiary's torch, and the slave-hunter's blood-hound, formed prominent features. It was often perilous to his life and property, for a man below North Carolina and Tennessee to express a desire for Mr. Lincoln's election. The promise of a United States Senator from North Carolina (Clingman), that Union men would be hushed by "the swift attention of vigilance committees," was speedily fulfilled.

It was not denied that the election had been fairly and legally conducted, or that the Republican platform pledged the nominee and his supporters to absolute non-interference with the rights and domestic policy of the States. That platform expressly declared, that "the maintenance, inviolate, of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and con

1 See Article XII. of the Amendments to the Constitution.

2 Bell received 89, Douglas 12, and Breckinridge 72.

3 He received 491,295 over Douglas, 1,018,499 over Breckinridge, and 1,275,821 over Bell. The votes for the four candidates, respectively, were: For Lincoln, 1,866,452; for Bell, 590,631; for Douglas, 1,875,141; and for Breckinridge, 847,958.

4 See Article XII. of the Amendments to the Constitution.

5 These were North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas. The electors of South Carolina were chosen by the State Legislature.

THE PEOPLE MISLED AND BEWILDERED.

37

trol its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends." But these and other facts, essential to a correct understanding of the issue, were studiously concealed from the people, or so adroitly shrouded in sophistry that they were kept far away from popular cognizance.

During the canvass preceding the election, the conspirators, and the politicians in their train, employed all the means in their power to excite intensely every blinding passion of the slaveholders and the masses of the people. They appealed to their fears, their prejudices, their local patriotism, and their greed. They asserted, with all the solemn seeming of sober truth, that the people of the Free-labor States, grown rich and powerful through robbery of the people of the Slave-labor States, by means of tariff laws and other governmental measures, and by immigration from foreign lands, had elected a sectional President for the purpose of carrying out a long-cherished scheme of ambition, namely, the political and social subjugation of the inhabitants of the Slave-labor States; the subversion of their system of labor; the elevation of the negro to social equality with the white man; and the destruction of Slavery, upon which, they alleged, had rested in the past, and must forever rest in the future, all substantial prosperity in the cotton-growing States. They held the Republican party responsible for John Brown's acts at Harper's Ferry,' and declared that his raid was the forerunner of a general and destructive invasion of the Slavelabor States by "the fanatical hordes of the North." They cited the publications and speeches of the Abolitionists of the North during the past thirty years; the legislation in the same section unfriendly to slavery; and the more recent utterances of leading members of the Republican party, in which it had been declared that "there is an irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery "_" the Republic cannot exist half slave and half free"-"freedom is the normal condition of all territory," &c.; they cited these with force, as proofs of long and earnest preparation for a now impending war upon "the South" and its institutions. They pictured, in high coloring, the dreadful paralysis of all the industry and commerce of “the South," and the utter extinguishment of all hopes of future advancement in art, science, literature, and the development of the yet hidden resources in the region below the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the Ohio, as a consequence of the domination in the National Government of their "bitter enemies," as they unjustly termed the people of the Free-labor States.'

66

In this unholy work, the press and the pulpit became powerful auxili

1 For the purpose of liberating the slaves of Virginia, John Brown, an enthusiast, with a few followers, seized Harper's Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, in October, 1859, as a base of operations. He failed. He was arrested by National and Virginia troops, and was hanged, in December following, by the authorities of Virginia.

This false teaching was not new. It was begun by John C. Calhoun, and had been kept up ever since. It was so in Madison's later days. In a letter to Henry Clay, cited by Dr. Sargeant, in his admirable pamphlet, entitled, England, the United States, and the Southern Confederacy, that statesman and patriot said:-"It is painful to see the unceasing efforts made to alarm the South, by imputations against the North of unconstitutional designs on the subject of Slavery." Madison and Clay were both slaveholders. Again, the former wrote: -The inculcated impression of a permanent incompatibility of interests between the North and the South may put it in the power of popular leaders, aspiring to the highest stations, to unite the South on some critical occasion. In pursuing this course, the first and most obvious step is nullification, the next secession, and the last, a final separation."

38.

TEACHINGS OF THE PRESS AND PULPIT.

aries. The former was widely controlled by politicians of the small ruling class in the Slave-labor States, and was almost everywhere subservient to their will in the promulgation of false teachings. There were exceptions, however

W. G. BROWNLOW.

noble exceptions; and there were those among influential newspaper conductors, like the heroic "Parson Brownlow," of Knoxville, East Tennessee, now (1865) Governor of that State, who could never be brought to bend the knee a single line to Baal nor to Moloch; but stood bravely erect until consumed, as it were, at the stake of martyrdom.'

So with the pulpit. It was extensively occupied by men identified socially and pecuniarily with the slave system. These men, with the awful dignity of ambassadors of Christ-vicegerents of the Almighty-declared Slavery to be a "divine institution," and that the fanatics of the Free-labor States who denounced it as wrong and sinful were infidels, and deserved the fate of heretics. They joined their potential voices with those of the politicians, in the cry for resistance to expected wrong and oppression; and thousands upon thousands of men. and women, regarding them as oracles of wisdom and truth, followed them reverentially in the broad highway of open treason.3

1 For an account of Dr. Brownlow's sufferings at the beginning of the war, see his work, entitled, Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession; with a Narrative of Personal Adventures among the⚫ Rebels. G. W. Childs. 1862.

2 See The Church and the Rebellion, by R. L. Stanton, D. D., of Kentucky.

The change in the sentiments of the clergy in the Slave-labor States, during the twenty-five years preceding the war, was most remarkable. We will notice only two or three instances in a single religious body, namely, the Presbyterians. In 1885, the representatives of that denomination in South Carolina and Georgia, in Convention assembled, made an official report against the perpetuation of the system of Slavery. "We cannot go into detail," they said; "it is unnecessary. We make our appeal to universal experience. We are chained to a putrid carcass. It sickens and destroys us. We have a millstone about the neck of our society to sink us deep in the sea of vice. Our children are corrupted from their infancy, nor can we prevent it," &c. In November, 1500, one of the most eminent Doctors of Divinity in the Presbyterian Church said, in his pulpit in New Orleans, after speaking of the character of the South:-"The particular trust assigned to such a people becomes the pledge of the Divine protection, and their fidelity to it determines the fate by which it is finally overtaken. What that trust is, must be ascertained from the necessities of their position, the institutions which are the outgrowth of their principles, and the conflicts through which they preserve their identity and independence. If then the South is such a people, what, at this juncture, is their providential trust? I answer, that it is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic Slavery as now existing." Again: "I simply say, that for us, as now situated, the duty is plain of conserving and transmitting the system of Slavery, with the freest scope for its natural development and extension." Again: "Need I pause to show how this system is interwoven with our entire social fabric? That these slaves form parts of our households, even as our children; and that, too, through a relationship recognized and sanctioned in the Scriptures of God, even as the other? Must I pause to show how it has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and molded the very type of our civilization? How then can the hand of violence be laid upon it, without involving our existence ?"-The South, her Peril and her Duty: a Thanksgiving Discourse, Nov. 29, 1860, by Rev. B. M. Palmer, D. D.

Ten or fifteen years before the war, an eminent Doctor of Divinity of the Presbyterian Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, put forth two pamphlets, in which he sought to claim for that denomination the glory of the authorship of the Declaration of Independence, alleging that its form and substance were fashioned after the bands and covenants of the church in Scotland. "Presbyterianism," he says exultingly, in praising the Declaration of Independence as almost divine in origin and character, "has proved itself to be the pillar and ground of truth, amid error and defection. It has formed empires, in the spirit of Freedom and Liberty, and has given birth to declarations and achievements which are the wonder of the present, and will

INTENDED FATE OF THE COMMON PEOPLE.

39

The "common people"-the non-slaveholders and the small slaveholderswhom the ruling class desired to reduce to vassalage,' but to whom they now looked for physical aid in the war which their madness might kindle, were blinded, confused, and alarmed. They were assured that the independence of the South would bring riches and honor to every household. They were deluded with promises of free trade, that would bring the luxuries of the world to their dwellings. They were promised the long-desired reopening of the African Slave-trade, which would make slaves so cheap that every man might become an owner of many, and take his position in the

be the admiration of every future age." On the 21st of November, 1860, the same Doctor of Divinity sald, from the pulpit of the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston, after stating that he stood there "in God's name and stead, to point out the cause of His anger:"-" Now, to me, pondering long and profoundly upon the course of events, the evil and bitter root of all our evils is to be found in the infidel, atheistic, French Revolu tion, Red Republican principle, embodied as an axiomatic seminal principle-not in the Constitution, but in the Declaration of Independence. That seminal principle is this:-'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'”—The Sin and the Cure, by Rev. Thomas Smyth, D. D. Doctor James H. Thornwell, President of a Theological Seminary at Columbia, S. C., one of the most eminent scholars and theologians in the South, and who was known in that State as "The Calhou of the Church," was ever foremost in the defense of Slavery as a divine institution. He even went so far as to assert his conviction that the horrible African Slave-trade was "the most worthy of all Missionary Societies." Clergymen of every religious denomination in the Slave-labor States were involved in the crime of rebellion, for the sake of perpetuating human Slavery. Their speeches, and sermons, and recorded acts are full of evidence that the CHURCH, in the broad meaning of that term, had become horribly corrupted by the Slave system, and made a willing instrument of the conspirators. It is related by the Rev. Dr. Stanton (The Church and the Rebellion, p. 163), that Robert Toombs, of Georgia, an arch-conspirator, went early to New Orleans, to stir up the people to revolt. The Union sentiment was too strong for him, and he was about to leave, when it was suggested that the Rev. Dr. Palmer might be induced to preach a new gospel, whose chief tenet should be the righteousness of Slavery. He seems to have been very ready to do so, and the Fast-day Sermon of Dr. Palmer, above alluded to, with all its terrible results, was a part of the fruits of the mission of Toombs to New Orleans, in the autumn of 1860. Dr. Palmer's discourse was seditious throughout. It was printed, and circulated by thousands all over the Slave-labor States, with direful effect. In the summer of 1865, after the war was ended, Dr. Palmer entered the same pulpit, and frankly told his people," says a New Orleans correspondent of the Boston Post, "that they had all been wrong, and he the chief of sinners; that they had been proud and haughty, disobedient, rebellious; that he himself had been humbled before God, and received merited chastisement; that they had all been taught a good lesson of obedience to civil authority, and he hoped it would be filially received by them as the children of Christ, and laid up in their heart of hearts."

For a complete history of the change in the sentiments of Christians of all denominations in the Slavelabor States, and the relations of the clergy to the conspirators, see a volume entitled The Church and the Rebellion, by R. L. Stanton, D. D., of Kentucky.

Of the 12,000,000 of inhabitants in the Slave-labor States, at the beginning of the war, the ruling classthose in whom resided, in a remarkable degree, the political power of the States-numbered about 1,000,000. Of these, the large land and slave holders, whose influence in the body of the million named was almost supreme, numbered less than 200,000. "In 1850," says Edward Atkinson, in the Continental Monthly for March, 1862, page 252, “there were in all the Southern States less than 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,500,000 out of 3,300,000." The production of the great staple, cotton, which was regarded as king of kings in an earthly sense, was in the hands of less than 100,000 men.

The remaining 11,000,000 of inhabitants in the Slave-labor States consisted of 6,000,000 of small slaveholders and non-slaveholders, mechanics, and laboring men; 4,000,000 of negro slaves, and 1,000,000 known in those regions by the common name of "poor white trash," a degraded population scattered over the whole surface of those States. The foregoing figures are only proximately exact, but may be relied on as a truthful statement of statistics, in round numbers.

For several years preceding the rebellion, many of the leading publicists in the Slave-labor States openly advocated a form of government radically opposed to that of our Republic. Their chief vehicle of communication with the small ruling class in those States was De Bow's Review, a magazine of much pretension and of acknowledged authority. The following brief paragraphs from the pages of that periodical, selected from a thousand of like tenor, will serve to illustrate the truth of the assertion in the text, that the vassalage of the "common people," in the new empire which long-contemplated revolt was to establish, was intended:"The right to govern resides in a very small minority; the duty to obey is inherent in the great mass of

mankind."

"There is nothing to which the South [the ruling class] entertains so great a dislike as of universal suffrage. Wherever foreigners settle together in large numbers, there universal suffrage will exist. They understand and admire the leveling democracy of the North, but cannot appreciate the aristocratic feeling of a privileged class, so universal at the South,"

The real civilization of a country is in its aristocracy. The masses are molded into soldiers and artisans by intellect, just as matter and the elements of nature are made into telegraphs and steam-engines. The poor,

40

HOW THE PEOPLE WERE DECEIVED.

social scale, with the great proprietors of lands and sinews.' Every avenue through which truth might find its way to the popular understanding was quickly closed, and the people had no detecter of its counterfeits. "Per

haps there never was a people," wrote a Southern Unionist, in the third year of the war, more bewitched, beguiled, and befooled than we were when we drifted into this rebellion."

Commenting on these actions of the politicians, President Lincoln said :— "At the beginning, they knew they would never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed as much moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much pride in, and reverence for, the history and Government of their common country, as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they would make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is, that any State of the Union may, consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. With rebellion thus sugarcoated, they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, until, at length, they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government, the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union, who could have been brought to no such thing the day before."

who labor all day, are too tired at night to study books. If you make them learned, they soon forget all that is necessary in the common transactions of life. To make an aristocrat in the future, we must sacrifice a thousand paupers. Yet we would by all means make them-make them permanent, too, by laws of entail and primogeniture. An aristocracy is patriarchal, parental, and representative. The feudal barons of England were, next to the fathers, the most perfect representative government. The king and barons represented everybody, because everybody belonged to them."

And when the war broke out, a writer in the Reriew said, with truth and candor:-"The real contest of to-day is not simply between the North and South; but to determine whether for ages to come our Government shall partake more of the form of monarchies or of more liberal forms."

1 There is ample evidence on record to show that Yancey, Davis, Stephens, and other leaders in the great rebellion were advocates of the foreign Slave-trade. Southern newspapers advocated it. The True Southron, of Mississippi, suggested the "propriety of stimulating the zeal of the pulpit by founding a prize for the best sermon in favor of free trade in negroes." For the purpose of practically opening the horrible traffic, an “African Labor-supply Association" was formed, of which De Bow, editor of the principal organ of the oligarchy, was nade president. Southern legislatures discussed the question. John Slidell, in the United States Senate, urged the propriety of withdrawing American cruisers from the coast of Africa, that the slavers might not be molested; and the administration of Mr. Buchanan was made to favor this scheme of the great cotton-planters, by protesting against the visitation of suspected slave-bearing vessels, carrying the American flag, by British cruisers. 2 New York Daily Times, June 4, 1864.

3 Message to Congress, July 4, 1861. Mr. Carpenter, the artist who painted the picture of The Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, relates the following anecdote concerning the last sentence in the above quotation from the Message:-"Mr. De Frees, the Government printer, told me that when the Message was being printed, he was a good deal disturbed by the use of the term 'sugar-coated,' and finally went to the President about it. Their relations to each other being of the most intimate character, he told Mr. Lincoln frankly that he ought to remember that a message to Congress was a different affair from a speech at a mass meeting in Illinois-that the messages became a part of history, and should be written accordingly. "What 's the matter how?' inquired the President. Why,' said Mr. De Frees, you have used an undignified expression in the Message;' and then reading the paragraph aloud, he added, I would alter the structure of that, if I were you.' 'De Frees,' replied Mr. Lincoln, that word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come, in this country, when the people won't know exactly what sugarcoated means!""