Forthcoming--The Presidential Election of 1860: Fractured Parties and Fractured Voters

The Election of 1860: A Campaign Fraught with Consequences, Michael F. Holt, (American Presidential Elections Series) University of Kansas Press, 272  pages, 7 black and white photographs, bibliography, index, $29.25, hardcover, publication date October 6, 2017

From the publisher: Because of its extraordinary consequences and because of Abraham Lincoln’s place in the American pantheon, the presidential election of 1860 is probably the most studied in our history. But perhaps for the same reasons, historians have focused on the contest of Lincoln versus Stephen Douglas in the northern free states and John Bell versus John C. Breckinridge in the slaveholding South.

In The Election of 1860 a preeminent scholar of American history disrupts this familiar narrative with a clearer and more comprehensive account of how the election unfolded and what it was actually about. Most critically, the book counters the common interpretation of the election as a referendum on slavery and the Republican Party’s purported threat to it. However significantly slavery figured in the election, The Election of 1860 reveals the key importance of widespread opposition to the Republican Party because of its overtly anti-southern rhetoric and seemingly unstoppable rise to power in the North after its emergence in 1854.

Also of critical importance was the corruption of the incumbent administration of Democrat James Buchanan—and a nationwide revulsion against party. Grounding his history in a nuanced retelling of the pre-1860 story, Michael F. Holt explores the sectional politics that permeated the election and foreshadowed the coming Civil War.

He brings to light how the campaigns of the Republican Party and the National (Northern) Democrats and the Constitutional (Southern) Democrats and the newly formed Constitutional Union Party were not exclusively regional. His attention to the little-studied role of the Buchanan Administration, and of perceived threats to the preservation of the Union, clarifies the true dynamic of the 1860 presidential election, particularly in its early stages.

Wide Awake In 1860 America: In Search of Young Men For Voting and Fighting

"Young Men for War: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign," Jon Grinspan, Journal of American History, 96:2, 2009.

The initial Wide Awake club was founded in March 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut but with two months, from Bangor Maine to San Fransico California major cities and rural counties boated local chapters. Even upper South cities, such as Baltimore, Wheeling, and St. Louis held chatpters. The youth and militancy of the members differentiated it from other political organizations during the 1860 presidential campaign.

Social events, fraternal memberships, the publication of comic books and the wearing of goatees, attracted younger voters. A generation deeply shaken by the spectacle of partisan electioneering and instability seemed to be looking for a political identity that took their youth into account. An emphasis upon military-type organization and uniforms with social behaviour short of violence offered social strengths and voices to those who had yet to vote due to age or had voted in one or two presidential elections.

Parades and rallies in Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and other cities and counties of Wide Awake members, clad in black raincoats and black hats, carrying torchs and marching in military ranks and files startled Northern politicans and enhanced fears lurking in Southern hearts. Total membership numbers cannot be obtained but marchers thoughout the North may have totaledd 70,000. An estimate of 100,000 individuals seems reasonable which would translate into one percent of the 2009 U.S. population. Grinspan, the author, does not provide a figure for the percentage of Northern voters in the 1860 election that 100,000 would represent.

In a fine review of the past 150 years of literature, Grinspan reviews and disputes attempts by social and political historians to characterize the Wide Awakes as being coerced by an abundance of alcohol, the temptation to group violence, and a sheep-like disposition to follow the loudest political voice. Conversely, Grinspan states that the Wide Awake movement demonstrates the existence of a middle ground neglected by social and political historians. Wide Awakes grew from local conditions and from the bottom-up not the national conditions and from the top-down.

In general campaign clubs foster competition, used appealing symbols and offered a program of mass events. Grinspan finds that the Wide Awakes surpassed local and national expectations in each of the three categories. The Wide Awake movement was birthed in Connecticut, grew in central Illinois and southern Wisconsin, then reached to central New York, southern New Jersey and southern Maine. There appears to have been 250 Wide Awake chapters in the North with Chicago containing 48 of them. States such as Massachusetts, Vermont, and Michigan [each a Republican bastion] had few and apparently quiet chapters. The movement appears to have thrive in sections that contained hot political contents. The first chapters were organized to supply as body gaurds for Republican and Free Soil public speakers.

Grinspan likens the growth and movement through society of the Wide Awakes to a colorful dye dropped into a city's water supply. During the twelve months, March 1860 to February 1861, the movement appeared to be a spontaneous but the author states that it was a fascinating and deliberate effort that used the new communication technology of telegraphic news. Appealing to political, generational and social conditions, the Wide Awake movement took advantage of the new network of partisn newspapers and militia fever. A uniform could be purchased for two dollars and local talent, Ulysses Grant for example, taught precision marching.

Bloodshed during Wide Awake mass demonstrations occurred in politically competitive cities of the lower North. Marchs were ambushed by rock and brick throwing opponents who damned and threaten to kill demonstrators who at times gave as good as they got. Guns sparked, knives flashed and clubs splintered. The Wide Awakes did not keep their marching formation when attacked; some fled and some assaulted their attackers. Marchers never displayed weapons but hid them under their raincoats. Focusing upon confronting northern Democrats, the Wide Awakes rarely considered the impression they were having on the South.

Southerners came to view the Wide Awakes as part of the Republican alledged coercion. In many Southern minds, the Republican presidential would appoint for the South Republican postmasters and possibly organize Wide Awake chapters. Such events would move the South from a one-party political system two a two-party political system.

And then the war came.

Images' Sources: Wide Awake America 1860

Off Topic: Picture This--- The Possibilty Of A Black President In The Foreground, American History In The Background

First Things , David W. Blight, History News Network, November 3, 2008.

“First things are always interesting, and this is one of our first things,” declared Frederick Douglass on April 14, 1876, in Washington D. C., in the most extraordinary public address ever delivered by an African American to that date. Extraordinary for its argument and its audience. Douglass gave the dedication speech at the unveiling of the Freedman’s Memorial, the statue of a standing Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation in hand, breaking the chains of a kneeling slave. Attending the event were President Ulysses S. Grant, members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the president’s cabinet. No black orator had ever addressed such an official assembly. If elected President, Barack Obama will be the second African American to address such a powerful audience on inauguration day.

Douglass struck chords of civil religion, referring to the “majestic dome of the Capitol,” and the sacred “heights of Arlington” cemetery. It was in this oration that Douglass famously called his white fellow citizens Lincoln’s “children,” but he and his fellow blacks “only his stepchildren.” One hundred and thirty-two years later we can still debate the meaning of those familial metaphors.

As we contemplate the “first” of Barack Obama achieving the presidency of the United States, we should brace ourselves with a long view of our history. We should take deep breaths and imagine the long prelude of the thousands murdered for trying to vote during Reconstruction, the thousands lynched because of the poisonous fears of white supremacy. And we should remember the millions denied life chances during the prolonged night of Jim Crow. Only then can we help Senator Obama feel the weight of responsibility in becoming America’s ultimate “first thing.” Such remembrance is both burden and inspiration.

If elected, Obama will have too many pressing issues to face to bask in mists of sentiment. But every American, whether they choose to or not, owns this heritage of slavery and racism that forces us to contemplate such first things. Whether they are the white “real Americans” in Sarah Palin’s small towns, or the rest of the equally real people in pluralistic and cosmopolitan cities, we all breathe in this past.

In order to keep perspective, we might reflect on two expressions of the condition of American race relations nearly a century apart, one from W. E. B. Du Bois’s masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and the other from Obama himself in his speech on race of March 18, 2008. In Souls, Du Bois asks his readers to see race relations at the turn of the twentieth century in the South through “two figures” who typified the legacies of slavery and the Civil War:

The one a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a… ruined form, with hate in his eyes; -- and the other a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife, -- aye,too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world….

Without a pause, Du Bois pressed the issue; “These were the saddest sights of that woeful day, and no man clasped the hands of these passing figures of the present-past; but hating they went to their long home, and hating their children’s children live today.”

At the end of his speech on race Obama tells a story. The organizer of his primary campaign in Florence, South Carolina was a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia. Ashley had grown up in poverty, her mother had contracted cancer when the girl was but nine years old, and she had survived on mustard and relish sandwiches while her mother lost her job and health insurance. At a campaign gathering, Ashley went around the room and asked all attending why they were there. Most mentioned a specific issue that especially animated their self-interest. Finally the ritual reached an elderly black man who had sat silently until asked why he was there. His answer was simple: “I am here because of Ashley.” As Obama admits, “by itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we start.”

Obama’s two figures - the young white southern woman, born well after the sixties and who in her impoverished background should have become a Republican resenting blacks in the South, and the old black man who could not vote until after 1965 in South Carolina - reverse Du Bois’s earlier harrowing image of the old white man and old black woman. Obama shows us an alternative to the “children’s children” of Du Bois’s story. A new start? This election will test more than the changing metaphors of our racial condition. But “first things” are the stuff of real hope, and they can be grasped only through the long history that gives them meaning.

This election will severely test how much Americans grasp the past they are being asked to overcome. If we are ever to build a society where no one must play the role of political “stepchild,” it will demand the informed courage of millions of Ashley Baias and her cousins of many hues. History is never over.

Mr. Blight, teaches American history at Yale University and is author of A Slave No More; and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

CWL: William Faulkner may have said it best. "The past is not dead. It is not even passed."

Text Source: History News Network, November 3, 2008

Image Source: David Blight, W.E.B. Dubois