The Stormy Present by Smith Adam I. P

Author:Smith, Adam I. P.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

CHAPTER SIX

The Essence of Anarchy

Secession and the War against Slaveholders

Having virtually imprisoned his aging father to prevent him from endorsing the Black Republicans, George Dock, the Harrisburg doctor and committed lifelong Democrat, thought the nation was descending into madness. In the weeks following Lincoln’s election, first South Carolina and then six other Deep South slave states seceded and formed a southern Confederacy while rumors swirled of slave uprisings and of arms being stockpiled in anticipation of civil war.1 Dock anxiously watched the “political barometer of our nation, as its heavy mercurial columns had been heaving and vibrating under the wild perturbations and stormy convulsions that have been rocking our noble ship with their fearful surges.”2 The Union had never been lashed by storms so severe.

The conventional wisdom among Democrats, echoing the spirit of Jefferson, was that the larger the Republic, the safer liberty would be. A big country was harder to corrupt than a small one, went the logic. And those who had remained loyal to the Democracy still believed, as they had always done, that their party represented “the only hope for the Union.”3 The South should have stayed to fight abolitionist “heresies” from “inside of the Union,” wrote an Indiana Democrat. That they had chosen to secede in response to an election—even one that had seen a “fanatical Black Republican” elected—meant they had “[forsaken] the maxims of Jefferson.”4

Democrats’ bewilderment that “our Southern friends” were in effect cooperating with Black Republicans to dismember the Union was accompanied by indignation.5 Theo Williams, an old Illinois crony of Stephen Douglas, fumed that the Southern wing of the party had “proved themselves as much a sectional party as the Abolition Republican Party.” The treason was first evident, Williams thought, when the Southern wing of the party reneged on the “common policy” of “non-intervention in the Territories” and demanded a federal slave code that they knew would “never, never” be acceptable to Northern Democrats: by giving up on the unity of the national party, they gave up on the Union.6

In those first weeks after Lincoln’s election, Democrats often tended to pathologize the “fanaticism” on both sides.7 As Victor Piollet of Pennsylvania put it, conservative men like him were surrounded, all of a sudden, by “insanity.”8 Anticipating the “blundering generation” thesis of the 1930s revisionist historians, the “insanity” analysis was often accompanied by resentment at the manipulation of these feelings by unscrupulous politicians. The Kentuckian Robert Anderson, a staunch Democrat and a major in the U.S. Army who was soon to find himself at the epicenter of the storm as the commander of Union forces at Fort Sumter, wrote sadly in early March 1861 that “dishonesty and bad faith” had “tainted the moral atmosphere of portions of our land. And alas how many have been prostrated by its blast.”9

By reaching for the “insanity” explanation, these lifelong Jacksonians revealed their imaginative failure to understand how quickly politics had changed. Typical were the Bigler brothers—William and John—who had come of age in the 1830s when they set up a Jacksonian newspaper in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.