June 18, 1860: The Democratic Convention, Take Two

Stephen Douglas

On Monday, June 18, 1860, the Democratic Party reconvened in Baltimore, Maryland.  The first convention, at Charleston, South Carolina, in April, had broken up over the ideology of front-runner Stephen A. Douglas, with many delegates walking out.  Pro-Douglas supporters went to work in several Southern states, getting the state conventions to name new delegations -- friendlier to Douglas -- to replace the ones that had walked out.  Everyone was present now in Baltimore, but which delegates were entitled to seats?

The problem was passed to the credentials committee.  From Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury...

It would take the credentials committee three days to wrestle with this problem, and until the wrestling ended, the convention could do nothing but wait, its collective temperature rising hour by hour. Douglas men paraded the streets with brass bands, pausing when the spirit moved them to listen to stump speeches; Southern die-hards, in turn, had a way of gathering in front of the Gilmore House, where (William) Yancey was staying, for stump speeches of their own; and nothing that was said or done at any of these meetings served to promote harmony. At the Douglas meetings, held often enough on the steps of the home of the eminent Reverdy Johnson, former Senator, former Attorney General, and a leader of the "moderates" on the slavery question, orators shouted that devotion to Douglas was the only true test of Democratic fidelity. At the Gilmore House, in turn, the Douglas men were denounced as abolitionists in disguise, and Yancey cried that these Doulas leaders were selfish men who, ostrich-like, "buried their heads in the sands of squatter soveriegnty" and thereby exposed their anti-slavery posteriors. On the fringes of these meetings there were often a number of fist fights.

John Breckinridge

On June 21, the credentials committee emerged with two reports.  The pro-Douglas majority report held that the new delegations from Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas should be seated.  The Georgia delegation would be equally divided between old and new delegates.  The minority report demanded seating the original Charleston delegations.  The convention would vote to decide the matter.  Choosing the majority report would mean that Douglas would almost certainly gain the nomination.

The New York delegation, which had been thought to be solidly for Douglas, shocked his supporters by asking for more time to make up its mind.  That put the showdown off until the following evening.  The convention chose the pro-Douglas majority report and the exodus of Southern delegates quickly followed.

On the following day, June 23, the remaining delegates got down to the business of picking a nominee.  On the first ballot, Douglas got 173 of 190 1/2 votes cast.  On the second ballot, he received 181 1/2 out of 194 1/2.  A motion was quickly adopted declaring Douglas the nominee.  Later that evening, Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama was chosen as the nominee for vice-president.

Like Charleston in April, Baltimore had two conventions on this final day.  The defectors worked quickly, putting together a platform that asserted the pro-slavery positions they had fought for at Charleston, commended a projected acquisition of Cuba, and endorsed a plan for a railroad from some point on the Mississippi to some point on the Pacific Coast.  John C. Breckinridge, the current vice president, was placed in nomination.  He won a two-thirds majority on the first ballot, and was given the nomination unanimously.  Joseph Lane of Oregon was named for the vice-presidency.  The country now had two Democratic parties and two Democratic candidates.

May 16, 1860: The Republican Convention

On Wednesday, May 16, 1860, the Republican National Convention was called to order in Chicago, Illinois.  They met in the Wigwam, a hastily built auditorium at Lake Street and Market (now Wacker Drive).  In The Coming Fury, Bruce Catton describes it as...

"a sprawling two-story affair of lumber...measuring 180 feet along one side and 100 feet along the other...Nobody really knew how many people could be jammed into the place; estimates ranged from 6000 to more than double that number.  Pillars were decorated with tinder-dry evergreen boughs, red, white, and blue steamers ran everywhere, and the hall was brilliantly lighted by flaring gas jets; all in all, the Wigwam must have been one of the most dangerous fire traps ever built in America."

This was the second convention in the new party's history and delegates were cautiously optimistic about their chances in the November election, especially since the Democrats seemed so hopelessly divided.  But the Republicans could not hope to win any Southern states.  In fact, they would not even appear on the ballot in most of them.  They had to sweep almost all of the Northern states to win.  If not, the election could be thrown to the House of Representatives, where anything could happen.  Complicating their hopes was a third party, the Constitutional Union Party.  At their convention earlier in the month, they had nominated John Bell of Tennessee as their candidate for president.

Going into the convention, William Seward of New York was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, but while the Democrats had been concerned with their candidates' ideology, the pragmatic Republicans were more concerned with their nominee's electability.  Seward had strong support throughout the Northeast, but the Republicans could count on winning that section no matter who their nominee was.  The main concern was the Northwestern states, especially Illinois and Indiana -- the very area where Seward was weakest.

Seward was seen as something of a radical.  In 1850, in his "maiden" speech in the Senate, Seward immediately established himself as a prominent antislavery leader.  He called the speech "Freedom in the New Territories," but it quickly became known as his "Higher Law" speech.  Southerners declared that the Constitution provided for the extension of slavery into the territories.  Seward declared, "There is a higher law than the Constitution."  According to Seward, slavery was doomed and secession was futile.  A few years later, in 1858, Seward had spoken of "an irresistible conflict between opposing and enduring forces."  Seward had not said anything that Lincoln had not said in his "House Divided" speech, but he had somehow angered many more people.  He attempted to moderate his image after that, but mostly just alienated his more radical supporters.  He would not win many votes from disaffected Democrats and could not expect to win many border states.

The other major candidates were Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Edward Bates of Missouri, and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.  From The Coming Storm,

"Chase was a famous anti-slavery leader:  a little too much so, perhaps, for a new party that was going to have to draw some support from the Northern Democrats.  Chase had lofty hopes, and yet he was not quite making a campaign of it; he was merely standing off stage, full of dignity and rectitude, willing to receive whatever might be given to him, but not equipped with the guides and beaters needed by a man who hoped to penetrate a jungle like this one at the Wigwam.  Bates had the important backing of the famous Blair family and he came from a border state, which was in his favor.  If the convention should try to placate the South (which was somewhat unlikely), Bates would be a very likely choice.  He had, however, presided over the national convention of the Know-Nothings in 1856 and he would be a loser in any state where the German or other foreign-born vote was essential.  Cameron was a typical political boss who could hardly hope to carry anything except his own state of Pennsylvania."

Lincoln was the logical anti-Seward candidate, and his handlers, led by Judge David Davis, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to point out Lincoln's strengths to the delegates.  From James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of the Republic,

He was a former antislavery Whig in a party made up mostly of former antislavery Whigs.  But despite his house divided speech, he had a reputation as a moderate...Lincoln had opposed the Know Nothings, which would help him with the German vote, but not so conspicuously as to drive away former American (Party) voters who would refuse to support Seward.  Already known popularly as Honest Abe, Lincoln had a reputation for integrity that compared favorably with the dubious image of Thurlow Weed's New York machine.  Of humble origins, Lincoln personified the free-labor ideology of equal opportunity and upward mobility.  He had been born in a log cabin...Lincoln the railsplitter became the symbol of frontier, farm, opportunity, hard work, rags to riches, and other components of the American dream embodied in the Republican self-image.  Finally, Lincoln was from a state and region crucial to Republican chances, particularly if Douglas as expected became the nominee of northern Democrats.  Except for William Henry Harrison, who died after a month in office, no president had been elected from the Old Northwest.  The fastest-growing part of the country, this region believed that its turn had come.  The selection of Chicago as the convention site incalculably strengthened Lincoln's candidacy.  Huge, enthusiastic crowds composed mostly of Illinoisians turned up at the large hall...Counterfeit tickets enabled thousands of leather-lunged Lincoln men to pack the galleries."

The opening day of the convention was mostly devoted to the business of organization, naming committees, installing a president -- George Ashmun of Massachusetts -- and listening to speeches.  The second day was devoted to the party's platform.  A Seward delegate moved that the nomination of a candidate should begin, but the convention secretary announced that the tally sheets weren't ready.  Rather than wait a few minutes, the convention adjourned for the day.  By the time balloting began on the third day, Lincoln's men were ready.  They had the Indiana delegation on their side from the first ballot, and, after voting for Cameron on the first ballot, the Pennsylvania delegation was ready to support Lincoln on the second ballot.  Lincoln had written Davis, "Make no contracts that will bind me," but Lincoln was not here and Cameron wanted to be Secretary of the Treasury.  Davis is supposed to have said, "Lincoln ain't here and don't know what we have to meet, so we must go ahead as if we hadn't heard from him and he must ratify it."  However it was done, Cameron was placated and the Pennsylvania delegation made the switch.

On the first ballot, Seward led with 173 1/2 votes.  Lincoln got 102, Cameron 50 1/2, Bates 48.  On the second ballot, the trend was clear:  Seward 184 1/2, Lincoln 181.  The third ballot had Lincoln with 231 1/2 votes, just 1 1/2 votes away from the nomination.  Seward was down to 180.  Before the fourth vote could be taken, D. K. Cartter of Ohio got the attention of the chair and announced "the change of four votes of Ohio from Mr. Chase to Mr. Lincoln."  After a wild uproar in which several other delegations attempted to change their vote totals, William Evarts, chairman of the New York delegation, came to the dais.  He expressed disappointment that Seward had not been nominated, but moved that Lincoln's nomination be made unanimous.  The convention passed the motion.

Cassius Clay of Kentucky received over 100 votes on the first ballot for vice president and seemed to be the favorite of the crowd in the Wigwam, but the professional politicians quashed that notion.  Clay was a true antislavery radical, a Westerner, and a former Whig.  They wanted Hannibal Hamlin -- a moderate, an Easterner, and a former Democrat -- to give the ticket balance.  Hamlin was nominated on the second ballot.

After choosing a committee to go to Springfield and formally tell Lincoln of his nomination, the convention adjourned.  Interestingly, President Lincoln would later name all the major candidates for the Republican nomination -- Seward, Chase, Cameron and Bates -- to his cabinet.

May 9, 1860: The Constitutional Union Convention

On Wednesday, May 9, 1860, a ragtag group -- remnants of the old Whig Party and a few Know-Nothings -- met in Baltimore.  They called themselves the United States Constitutional Union Convention, and nominated John Bell of Tennessee as their candidate for president.  The distinguished orator Edward Everett of Massachusetts was named their vice-presidential candidate.

There was no way Bell could be elected.  He and the party stood for moderation at a time when the nation was quickly dividing into extremes.  The hope was that he would win enough votes to prevent anyone else from winning, throwing the election to the House of Representatives, where cooler heads might come to a reasonable compromise.

The convention denounced political party platforms as frauds, then adopted a simple one of their own which pledged to uphold the Constitution, the Union and the Enforcement of the Laws.  The convention adjourned without a single mention of slavery in the territories or the fugitive slave laws, but John Brown was mentioned a couple of times in passing.

Bell, a wealthy slaveowner, was 64 years old.  He had spent much of his life in politics, beginning as a Democrat before a falling out with Andrew Jackson in the fight over the Bank of the United States.  He served in the House of Representatives from 1827 to 1841, and served as Speaker of the House from 1834 to 1835.  Bell did a brief stint as Secretary of War in 1841 under Presidents Harrison and Tyler, then served two terms as a senator from 1847 to 1859.

Bell was very popular in the border states, and his candidacy had an impact the following week in Chicago at the Republican Convention.  William Seward, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, was weakest in the states where Bell was strongest, and the Republicans, who needed almost a clean sweep of the Northern states, finally chose Abraham Lincoln as their nominee, deciding that he was the more electable candidate.

April 23, 1860: The Democratic Convention

On Monday, April 23, 1860, the Democratic National Convention convened at South Carolina Institute Hall in Charleston to choose their nominee for president of the United States.  Some of the delegates hoped the party could unite around an electable moderate -- Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was the clear favorite -- but slavery, particularly the issue of slavery in the territories, made that impossible.

Douglas was unacceptable to most of the Southern delegates and a small minority, the fire-eating secessionists believed they could get everything they wanted, a new nation, if the party lost the election.

Historian Bruce Catton, in The Coming Storm, says of Douglas that he "was a man about whom no one could be indifferent.  He was either a remorseless scheming politician or a hero defending the eternal truth, the appraisal depending partly on the observer's point of view and partly on what Douglas himself was up to at the moment...Very few men either hated or admired him just a little.  A passionate man himself, he evoked passion in others, in his friends and in his enemies."

Slavery in the territories became the major issue in American politics following the Dred Scott decision.  Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared in his opinion that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in a territory.  The Fifth Amendment protected persons from being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.  Slaves were no different than any other property thus a ban on slavery was unconstitutional.  "And if Congress itself cannot do this—if it is beyond the powers conferred on the Federal Government—it will be admitted, we presume, that it could not authorize a territorial government to exercise them. It could confer no power on any local government, established by its authority, to violate the provisions of the Constitution."

Republicans declared this opinion to be an obiter dictum -- an opinion voiced by a judge that has only incidental bearing on the case in question and is therefore not binding.  They refused to recognize the ruling as a binding precedent and vowed to "reconstitute" the Court after winning the presidency in 1860.

Democrats were overjoyed with the ruling.  Southern Democrats felt vindicated that "Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery...is now the supreme law of the land."  Northern Democrats called Taney's opinion "the funeral sermon of Black Republicanism," but were later discomfited to realize that slave property could never be excluded from a territory.

Douglas, a proponent of popular sovereignty, jumped into the fray with a speech at Springfield, Illinois, in June 1857.  He declared that the right of property in slaves was "a barren and worthless right" if the people of territory did not want it, if it was not "sustained, protected and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local legislation."

Lincoln began speaking of a pro-slavery conspiracy that was trying to "push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States," and began trying to paint Douglas as part of the conspiracy.  At Freeport, Illinois, during their senatorial debates in 1858, Lincoln pressed Douglas on the contradiction between Dred Scott and popular sovereignty.  Could the people of a territory exclude slavery if they wished?  From James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom...

Folklore history has portrayed this question as the stone that slew Goliath. If Douglas answered No, he alienated Illinois voters and jeopardized his re-election to the Senate.  If he answered Yes, he alienated the South and lost their support for the presidency in 1860.  The problem with this thesis is that Douglas had already confronted the issue many times.  Lincoln knew how he would answer the question:  "He will instantly take ground that slavery can not actually exist in the territories, unless the people desire it, and so give it protective territorial legislation.  If this offends the South he will let it offend them; as at all events he means to hold on to his chances in Illinois...He cares nothing for the South -- he knows he is already dead there" because of his opposition to Lecompton.  Lincoln asked the question anyway; Douglas answered as expected.  His answer became famous in retrospect as the Freeport doctrine.

Lincoln was right.  Douglas was already dead in the South because of Lecompton.  Faced with an estimated two-to-one majority of free-soil settlers, the pro-slavery legislature in Kansas set up a rigged constitutional convention.  Delegates would be elected, but pro-slavery sheriffs were charged with registering voters and pro-slavery county commissioners would choose judges of elections.  Free-soilers refused to participate in this farce.  With only 2200 of 9250 registered voters participating, pro-slavery delegates won all the seats to the constitutional convention at Lecompton.  They sent their pro-slavery constitution and a petition for statehood to Congress without a referendum.

The Lecompton constitution caused such an uproar that the convention had to relent.  They now mandated a referendum on two alternative slavery clauses -- "Constitution with Slavery" or "Constitution with no Slavery."  This seemed fair except that the "no Slavery" clause declared that "the right of property in slaves now in this Territory shall in no manner be interfered with."  It merely prohibited the future importation of slaves.  Douglas became one of the fiercest opponents of the Lecompton scullduggery, forever tarnishing his relationship with Southern Democrats.

In January 1860, the Alabama Democratic convention instructed its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories.  Other lower-South conventions soon followed suit.  Jefferson Davis laid the groundwork in a series of resolutions to the Senate.

The showdown came to the platform committee where each state had one vote.  California and Oregon joined the slave states to provide a majority of 17 to 16 for a slave-code plank.  The minority reaffirmed the party's 1856 platform endorsing popular sovereignty and adding a pledge to obey Taney's Supreme Court decision.  This was not good enough for the South.  The whole point of Douglas's own Freeport doctrine was that the Court decision could not enforce itself.  Two days of partisan wrangling ensued with southerners as determined to pass a slave-code plank as Douglas men were to block one.  Finally, the Douglas men prevailed, passing the minority platform 165 to 138.  Free states voted for it 154 to 30.  Slave states voted against it 11 to 108.  Fifty delegates from the lower-South states promptly walked out of the convention.

Douglas's supporters were at first elated with the walk-out.  With so many of the senator's enemies gone, it would be easy to get enough votes from the delegates that remained.  Then Caleb Cushing, the chairman and no friend of Douglas, ruled that whoever was nominated must get the votes of two-thirds of the original delegation, not just those that remained.  202 votes were needed.  For three days and 57 ballots, Douglas never got more than 152 1/2 votes.  James Guthrie of Kentucky, Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, Joseph Lane of Oregon, Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee and others received votes.  Finally, on May 3, the delegates called it quits and adjourned the convention.  They would reconvene in Baltimore on June 18.

Meanwhile, the Southern delegates who had walked out met, on May 1, in Military Hall and declared themselves the real Democratic convention.  The majority group they had deserted was the "rump convention."  They appointed a chairman, Senator James Bayard of Delaware, and passed a slave-code platform.  Then they sat back to see what the "rump convention" would do.  Most were hoping for Douglas to remove his name from consideration so that a more palatable candidate could be selected.  Barring that, they would choose their own nominee.  When the "rump convention" adjourned, they were at a loss and also adjourned.

February 27, 1860: Lincoln at Cooper Union

On Monday, February 27, 1860, Lincoln gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City.  The speech laid the groundwork for him to eventually win the Republican presidential nomination at their convention in May.  In fact, historian Harold Holzer wrote a book about the speech and titled it, "Lincoln at Cooper Union:  The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President."

Lincoln accepted the invitation to speak in New York City in October 1859.  It was to be held at Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, but the Young Men's Republican Union assumed sponsorship of the speech and moved it to Cooper Union.  Lincoln discovered this only after his arrival in New York City.

Several members of the YMRU, such as Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryan, were opposed to William Seward, who was seen as the likely Republican nominee, and were casting about for alternatives.  Several other political figures declined invitations to speak, but this tall, ungainly Westerner, making his first address in the media capital of the country, delivered a well-researched speech that, according to Holzer, "skewered Stephen Douglas, deftly allied the Republicans with the Founding Fathers, promised the South he meant no threat to slavery where it existed, and then insisted that slavery itself was unmistakably evil."  He spoke before a crowd of about 1500 prominent New Yorkers, but newspapers spread his message across the Northeast and the rest of the country.  The speech transformed Lincoln into a national political figure.

The speech was in three parts.  Part One concerned the Founding Fathers and the positions they took on expanding slavery into the territories.  Lincoln showed that the Fathers were on the side of the Republicans.  Part Two was aimed at the South and argued that the Republican position on slavery was the "conservative" policy.  Part Three was aimed at Republicans and urged them to fight to prevent the expansion of slavery.  The speech did not contain many of Lincoln's usual rhetorical flourishes and is seldom quoted, but is known as his "right makes might" speech for a passage that came at the end:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

The text of the speech can be found at the National Park Service's site for the Lincoln Home.  A narration by Sam Waterston can be found at NPR.

After Lincoln's arrival in New York City, but before the speech, he visited Matthew Brady's photography studio on Bleecker Street.  The resulting image (shown above) would become known as the "Cooper Union Portrait" and would be the basis for campaign posters in the 1860 election.

February 2, 1860: Jefferson Davis's Resolutions

On Thursday, February 2, 1860, one day after the U.S. House of Representatives finally elected a speaker, Senator Jefferson Davis (D-MS) introduced a series of resolutions on slavery in the U.S. Senate.

In the first of the six resolutions, Douglas argued that the States had adopted the Constitution as "free and independent sovereignties" and that "any intermeddling by any one or more States, or by a combination of their citizens, with the domestic institutions of the others, on any pretext, whether political, moral, or religious, with the view to their disturbance or subversion, is in violation of the Constitution, insulting to the States so interfered with, endangers their domestic peace and tranquillity--objects for which the Constitution was formed--and, by necessary consequence, serves to weaken and destroy the Union itself."  In case there was any doubt, he made it clear in the second resolution that the main "domestic institution" he was talking about was slavery.  He went on to argue in further resolutions that slavery could not be limited in the territories.  Only after a territory was admitted to the Union as a state could the residents outlaw slavery, and any interference of the Fugitive Slave Act was "hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution and revolutionary in their effect."

Davis did not seem to care if the resolutions were adopted; the purpose seemed to be to undermine Senator Stephen Douglas's Freeport Doctrine and to introduce principles Southern Democrats could unite behind at the upcoming convention of the Democratic Party.  The resolutions would put Douglas, the expected Democratic nominee for president in 1860 in an impossible position if they could be adopted as the part of the party's platform.  Douglas could not and would not try to defend these principles in the North.

Douglas recognized the trap laid for him and questioned the need for the resolutions:  "There is no necessity for legislation; no grievances to be remedied; no evil to be avoided; no action is necessary; and yet the peace of the country, the integrity of the Democratic party, is to be threatened by abstract resolutions, when there is confessedly no necessity for action."

The resolutions eventually passed in the Senate, but not in the House.

When the Democratic Party's platform committee met later that year in Charleston, each state had one vote.  California and Oregon joined the slave states to provide a majority of 17-16 for a slave-code plank based on the Davis resolutions.

February 1, 1860: A New Speaker of the House

On Wednesday, February 1, 1860, the U.S. House of Representatives finally chose a speaker.  William Pennington, a Republican from New Jersey, was chosen by a majority of one vote.

With passions now fully inflamed from John Brown's raid and execution, the first session of the Thirty-Sixth United States Congress convened in Washington on December 5, 1859.  The first order of business for the House was to organize and elect a speaker, usually a routine task.

The newly-formed Republican Party had a plurality, but not a majority.  There were 109 Republicans, 101 Democrats, 26 members of the American Party, a few Know-Nothings, and one lone Whig.  On the first ballot, Republicans lined up behind John Sherman of Ohio, who was thought to be moderate enough to garner the votes of enough representatives to win.  Democrats backed Thomas S. Bocock of Virginia.  Neither man gained enough votes, a majority, because a few other candidates received a scattering of votes.

Before a second ballot could be taken, Representative J. B. Clark (D-Mo.) put forth a resolution "that the doctrine and sentiments of a certain book, called 'The Impending Crisis of the South -- How to Meet It,' purporting to have been written by one Hinton Helper, are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquility of the country, and that no member of this House who has endorsed or recommended it or the Compend from it is fit to be Speaker of the House."

If the goal was to shut down the government, Clark's resolution was a brilliant political move. As historian Bruce Catton put it in The Coming Fury...

That did it...(F)rom the time the Missouri Congressman dropped his resolution into the hopper, the House of Representatives became completely impotent.  It could not elect a speaker, it could not get itself organized, it could not even vote the pay which its members needed so badly, until it had worn itself out in hot discussion of a book which, taken by itself, was hardly of minor importance.  The row to which it gave birth settled nothing whatever.  It simply registered (in terms that would be ratified in blood, a short time thereafter) the appalling height the American political fever had reached.  The irrational had become wholly logical."

In The Impending Crisis, Helper, a Southerner, denounced slavery, not because of any benevolent feelings for the slaves, but because of the harm he thought the institution was inflicting on Southern whites.  "Slavery," he declared, "lies at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South."  The New York Tribune recognized the book's value to Republicans and published a favorable review.  Some Southern states made it a crime to circulate the book.  A Republican committee published an abridged version in 1859 with added captions such as "The Stupid Masses of the South" and "Revolution -- Peacefully if we can, Violently if we must."

When Clark urged the House to resolve that anyone who had endorsed the Helper book was unfit to be speaker, he knew that 68 Republicans, including almost every viable Republican candidate, had signed a circular advertising the compend, the abridged version of the book.  The debate over the resolution went on for week after week, with the language becoming increasingly incendiary and members coming to the chamber armed.  Sherman was forced to try to explain that he lent his name without knowing what he was endorsing:  "I do not recollect signing the paper referred to, but I presume, from my name appearing in the printed list, that I did sign it.  I therefore make no excuse of any kind.  I never read Mr. Helper's book, or the compendium founded upon it.  I have never seen a copy of either."

Finally, on January 30, 1859, Sherman had had enough and withdrew his name from consideration.  After a series of give-and-take deals, William Pennington was chosen as Speaker of the House by one vote.

From Catton's The Coming Fury:  "At various places in the North, ardent Republicans celebrated, firing cannon and making jubilant speeches, as if some sort of victory had been won; and if the House had in fact discharged the unendurable emotional tension that possessed it, so that it could now get down to business and give the nation orderly government, a celebration would have been in order.  But nothing had been settled.  One stalemate had been ended, but the greater stalemate remained:  the undigestible lump of slavery remained, and this one effort to cope with it had been a noisy and spectacular failure.  Only the extremists had gained anything."

December 2, 1859: John Brown Is Executed

On Friday, December 2, 1859, the "fiendish career" (as Mahala Doyle put it) of John Brown came to an end.  Brown began the day by reading his Bible, writing a few quick notes and letters, and adding a codicil to his will, which he had drafted the day before.  He handed one of the notes to a guard...

Charlestown, Va, 2nd, December, 1859

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

While in the jail and at the gallows, Brown refused the ministrations of all Virginia clergymen because of their pro-slavery convictions.  He told one that he "would not insult God by bowing down in prayer with anyone who had the blood of the slave on his skirts" and told another, "I will thank you to leave me alone; your prayers would be an abomination to my God."

At 11 a.m., Brown was led from his cell.  He said a quick goodbye to some of his fellow raiders who were in the other cells, urging them to "stand up like men" and accusing a couple of making false statements.  He was escorted through a crowd of 2000, mostly V.M.I. cadets, among them Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and John Wilkes Booth, who had borrowed a militia uniform to gain admittance.  Brown embraced the role of the martyr -- he had written to his wife, "I have been whipped as the saying is, but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster; by only hanging a few moments by the neck; and I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat."  At the gallows, there was a delay of about ten minutes while the soldiers struggled to find their assigned spots.  Brown was hung at 11:15 and pronounced dead at 11:50.  He was placed in a black walnut coffin with the noose still around his neck.

A plaque marks the site of his hanging at 515 S. Samuel St. in Charles Town, West Virginia.

In the North, church bells toiled, guns fired salutes, ministers preached sermons of commemoration and thousands prayed.  Southern whites were enraged by the Yankees who were canonizing the murderer who had tried to stir up a slave revolt.

Brown didn't want to be buried in Virginia because he didn't want to be buried in a coffin made by slaves, so after his execution his wife shipped his body north.  In New York City, a Brooklyn undertaker prepared the body for burial.  Then his body was shipped further north, to the Adirondack Mountains, to the family farm in North Elba.  He was buried in the front yard of his home on December 8.  The remains of his followers who fought and died at Harpers Ferry, including two of his sons, were moved to this small graveyard in 1899.  The farm is now the John Brown Farm (NY) State Historic Site.

On December 14, 1859, the U.S. Senate appointed a bipartisan committee to investigate the Harpers Ferry raid and to determine the extent of the conspiracy.  After hearing testimony from 32 witness, the committee found no evidence of a conspiracy, but implied that the raid was the result of Republican doctrines.

From Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson...

John Brown's ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened.  Several historians have compared the region's mood to the "Great Fear" that seized the French countryside in the summer of 1789 when peasants believed that the "King's brigands are coming" to slaughter them.  Keyed up to the highest pitch of tension, many slaveholders and yeomen alike were ready for war to defend hearth and home against those Black Republican brigands.  Thousands joined military companies; state legislatures appropriated funds for the purchase of arms.  Every barn or cotton gin that burned down sparked new rumors of slave insurrections and abolitionist invaders.  Every Yankee in the South became persona non grata.  Some of them received a coat of tar and feathers and a ride out of town on a rail.  A few were lynched.  The citizens of Boggy Swamp, North Carolina, ran two northern tutors out of the district.  "Nothing definite is known of their abolitionist or insurrectionary sentiments," commented a local newspaper, "but being from the North, and, therefore, necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions, their presence in this section has been obnoxious."  The northern-born president of an Alabama college had to flee for his life.  In Kentucky a mob drove thirty-nine people associated with an antislavery church and school at Berea out of the state.  Thirty-two representatives in the South of New York and Boston firms arrived in Washington reporting "indignation so great against Northerners that they were compelled to return and abandon their business."  In this climate of fear and hostility, Democrats prepared for their national convention at Charleston in April 1860.

Thoreau Mental Floss

In my latest post about John Brown I linked to and quoted from Henry David Thoreau's "A Plea for Captain John Brown."  A little later I was scanning through the mental_floss blog when I ran across "3 Bizarre Cases of Death by Shaving."  Death by shaving?  Wow!  The first guy contracted anthrax from the badger brush the barber used.  The second guy was nicked by a barber and ended up dying of severe edema.  The third guy was John Thoreau...

John Thoreau was the brother of famous American writer and Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau. In the winter of 1841, while taking part in his daily shave, John Thoreau cut himself with his razor. A few days later he came down with lockjaw and died in Henry David’s arms. His brother’s death devastated Thoreau. He didn’t talk to his family or write in his journal for weeks.

Thoreau’s good friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggested that he go spend some time out in the woods alone near a pond called Walden. Thoreau took this sage advice, and one of America’s greatest essays was born. All thanks to shaving.

As Paul Harvey might say, "...and now you know...the rest of the story."

November 2, 1859: John Brown Is Found Guilty

On Wednesday, November 2, 1859, John Brown was found guilty of treason, multiple first-degree murders, and inciting an insurrection among Virginia slaves. The charges stemmed from the raid on Harpers Ferry in October. The trial took eight days, and although the raid took place on Federal property, Brown was tried by the State of Virginia at Charles Town.

If John Brown had died at Harpers Ferry, the whole episode might have been just a curious footnote in the pages of history.  The real effect of the raid came as Brown wrote letters and gave interviews while awaiting trial.  Though not known for eloquence before, he rose to the occasion, and galvanized public opinion North and South, probably hastening the beginning of the Civil War. At one end of the spectrum of opinion was Henry David Thoreau's "A Plea for Captain John Brown"

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp's rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow-man so well, and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him. He took up his life and he laid it down for him. What sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?

...Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hung? Is it indispensable to any Northern man? Is there no resource but to cast this man also to the Minotaur? If you do not wish it, say so distinctly. While these things are being done, beauty stands veiled and music is a screeching lie. Think of him- of his rare qualities!- such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope! You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the saviour of four millions of men.

At the other end was such as the Richmond Whig editors who wrote...

Though it convert the whole Northern people, without an exception, into furious, armed abolition invaders, yet old Brown will be hung! That is the stern and irreversible decree, not only of the authorities of Virginia, but of the PEOPLE of Virginia, without a dissenting voice. And, therefore, Virginia, and the people of Virginia, will treat with the contempt they deserve, all the craven appeals of Northern men in behalf of old Brown's pardon. The miserable old traitor and murderer belongs to the gallows, and the gallows will have its own

...and Mahala Doyle, whose husband and two sons were killed by Brown's men at Pottawatomie, Kansas...

Altho' vengeance is not mine, I confess that I do feel gratified to hear that you were stopped in your fiendish career at Harper's Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You can't say you done it to free slaves. We had none and never expected to own one...My son John Doyle whose life I beged of you is now grown up and is very desirous to be at Charlestown on the day of your execution.

In Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James McPherson writes about how the reaction in the South was colored by "a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery."  Southern whites insisted that slavery was a benevolent institution -- that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage -- but they always lived in fear of a slave insurrection.  For weeks after the raid wild rumors of uprisings swept across the South.  By the time Brown was executed, Southerners were able to breathe sighs of relief.  "The South's professed belief in the slaves' tranquility was right after all!  It was only Yankee fanatics who wanted to stir up trouble."

The jury was out only 45 minutes.  After his conviction, Brown made a statement to the court...

"I have, may it please the court, a few words to say. In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection. I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done! Let me say one word further. I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances. it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention and what was not. I never had any design against the life of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of that kind. Let me say, also, a word in regard to the statements made by some of those connected with me. I hear it has been stated by some of them that I have induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness. There is not one of them but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part of them at their own expense. A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me; and that was for the purpose I have stated. Now I have done."

Brown was sentenced to hang one month later on December 2, 1859.

October 16-18, 1859: John Brown's Raid

This post marks a new direction to this blog.  With the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War fast approaching, I'm embarking on a series of  posts that look back 150 years to what was happening then, a day-to-day accounting of the Civil War.  Posting will be light until...well, until 2011, when it actually is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, but there were a few different episodes of interest between 1859 and 1861 that I'll touch upon, starting with John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry...

On Sunday, October 16, 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown and a group of followers seized the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.  Brown's plan was not to seize the arms and escape, but to hole up and arm the army of slaves that he expected would soon join him.

The abolitionist movement had been nonviolent, but John Brown was not.  He had been in the midst of the fight in Bleeding Kansas, killing five pro-slavery settlers in the Pottawatomie Massacre and fighting in the battles of Palmyra and Osawatomie.  Although Brown and his band of 38 men were routed in the latter battle, Brown achieve national recognition for his tactics and his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.  He became a hero to the abolitionist movement, and when the fighting in the state subsided, he traveled to New England to raise money from influential supporters.  A group of fellow radicals, the Secret Six -- Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Luther Stearns, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Gerrit Smith -- gave him much financial support, often with no questions asked.

Brown arrived at Harpers Ferry in July of 1859.  Using the alias Isaac Smith, he rented a nearby farmhouse and awaited recruits.  Only a few showed up.  They hid out in the attic until they finally decided that no one else was coming.

After sundown on October 16, Brown moved on Harpers Ferry.  The original plan called for a brigade of 4500 men, but Brown had just 21, including three free blacks, one freed slave and a fugitive slave.  Brown left three men behind as a rear guard.  He had 200 Beecher's Bibles and almost a thousand pikes, and when he captured the armory he would have over 100,000 muskets and rifles for his slave uprising.

At first, the raid went well.  They cut the telegraph wires and captured the armory which was guarded by just a single watchman.  A party rode to the nearby Beall-Air estate and the Allstadt House, where they took several hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, a great grandnephew of George Washington.  The first casualty of the raid was an African-American baggage handler, Hayward Sullivan, who was shot and killed as he ran to warn the passengers of an approaching Baltimore & Ohio train.  The train continued on toward Washington, raising the alarm as it went.

In August 1859, John Brown met with Frederick Douglass.  "Come with me, Douglass, I want you for a special purpose.  When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them."  But Douglass was convinced that Brown's was a suicide mission, that an attack against the federal government "would array the whole country against us." Plus, there was the matter of Harpers Ferry.  The arsenal was situated on a peninsula formed where the Shenandoah River met the Potomac, and surrounded by high ground.  It was perfectly indefensible and would change hands many times during the Civil War.  Brown was caught in a trap.

Early on the morning of October 17, armory workers discovered Brown's raiders and retreated to the hills to join with a growing crowd of townspeople, who were sniping at Brown's men.  Militia companies from Virginia and Maryland converged on the town.  One company charged across the bridge, cutting off Brown's only escape route.  Brown retreated with the surviving raiders and hostages to the fire-engine house.  He sent out his son Watson and another raider with a white flag, but they were shot down.  Four Harpers Ferry residents, including the mayor, were killed that afternoon.  In all, eight of Brown's raiders, including three of his sons, were killed.  The angry mob used some of the dead bodies for target practice.  Seven raiders escaped, but two were later captured.

President James Buchanan ordered a detachment of U.S. Marines to Harpers Ferry.  They were commanded by two cavalry officers, Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.  They arrived during the evening hours.  One of Lee's first acts was to close the local saloons in an attempt to control the unruly mob.

Soon after daybreak on October 18, Colonel Robert E. Lee sent Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart forward to the Harpers Ferry engine-house (forever after known as "John Brown's Fort") under a flag of truce.  Lee's written demand to John Brown and the remaining raiders was immediate surrender.  John Brown refused, saying, "No, I prefer to die here."

Stuart gave a signal and a storming party of twelve marines, three with sledge hammers, began to try to break in the doors of the engine-house, but Brown had barricaded the doors with the fire engine and fastened them with ropes.  Lee sent in reserves.  A heavy ladder was used as a battering ram.  Finally, a small section of the door was knocked in.  The first marine through the opening was shot dead, but the rest of the storming party quickly subdued the remaining raiders.  Lieutenant Israel Greene cornered Brown and struck him several times in the head.  He then attempted to run him through with his sword, but it struck Brown's belt buckle and bent.  Within just a couple of minutes, the whole affair was over.  The raiders were captured and the hostages were freed.  The raid was over about 32 hours after it began.

Virginia Governor Henry Wise arrived at Harpers Ferry in the afternoon, accompanied by a group of reporters.  Brown was an instant celebrity and laid on the stone floor for hours answering all their questions.

I wish to say that you had better -- all you people of the South -- prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. You may dispose of me very easily -- I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled -- this negro question I mean; the end of that is not yet.

In the meantime, troops searched the Kennedy farm where the raiders had been hiding out since July.  They found a large carpetbag crammed full of letters from Brown's supporters, including the Secret Six.  It seemed as if the whole of the North were in on the attack.

Wild rumors circulated throughout the South of armed blacks and bands of abolitionists.  Lynch mobs howled for Brown's blood.  Although he had attacked a federal installation, he was was turned over to the State of Virginia.  At Charleston, on October 20, he was indicted on charges of treason, murder, and fomenting insurrection.

About Me and This Blog

I'm what you would call an amateur historian. I don't have a history degree, but I've lived in the Chattanooga area, surrounded by the nation's oldest and largest military park, for most of my life, and I've always been curious about what happened here. It's hard to believe that this place where I live used to be a battlefield where thousands were killed or wounded while fighting for what they believed in. I stand on the crest of Missionary Ridge and look at the beautiful homes around me (some with a cannon or two or a plaque in the front yard marking out a unit's location during the battle) and wonder about the men who defended this hill. I look out at the valley below and wonder what possessed those men to charge up the steep slope. On the other side of the valley is Lookout Mountain, where another battle took place. Between Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, in the valley, is Orchard Knob, scene of a minor little skirmish that kicked off the Battles for Chattanooga, and the National Cemetery, the burial place of thousands that died in that war and later ones, including some of Andrews Raiders, who were captured and executed after the Great Locomotive Chase. A few miles to the south, across the Georgia state line, is the Chickamauga Battlefield. The history is all around me.

This blog started out as a general Civil War blog with an emphasis on the Chattanooga Campaign. As the 150th anniversary of the war approached in 2011, this blog turned into an almanac-style day-to-day history of the war. Due to some personal vexations, I got behind on the day-to-day recounting. I got caught up momentarily before some additional vexations caused me to fall behind again, then finally call a halt to the project. I hope to eventually finish the almanac with, for clarity's sake, the entries postdated to fall within the 150th anniversary timeline.

The Chattanooga history posts that were originally here have been transferred to a new blog, Chattanooga's Civil War.

What If? -- A Review of Sorts

What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley, plunges the reader into the world of alternative history; acclaimed historians examine crucial moments in history and discuss what might have happened if events had not played out as they did. The series contains two volumes devoted to world history and one of American history. This is not the alternative history fiction with spaceships and time travelers like the novels of Harry Turtledove that explore what might have happened if Robert E. Lee had AK-47s at the Battle of the Wilderness. These are essays of the "for want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost" variety.

There are some interesting points to ponder in the American history volume. Novelist Caleb Carr discusses how the American Revolution might have ended before it began if the colonialists' main champion in the British Parliament, William Pitt, had not taken ill. David McCullough examines the Battle of Long Island and the whims of weather that allowed George Washington's army to escape annihilation. Tom Wicker discusses the many peculiarities of the presidency of "His Accidency" John Tyler. Other essays tackle the "What Ifs?" of the JFK assassination, Watergate, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other events.

Four of the seventeen essays take on events of the Civil War. One focuses on popular culture, the other three deal with the fate of the nation.

Victor Davis Hanson writes of "Lew Wallace and the Ghosts of the Shunpike." At the Battle of Shiloh, Wallace was in command of a reserve division a few miles away. When Grant ordered him to bring his force forward to support the battered Union army, Wallace chose the wrong road. He took the short route over a road that was swampy and even underwater in places. The other road, the Shunpike, would have carried him out right where he was needed most - on Sherman's right flank. Wallace finally gave up on the impassable road and had to turn his division around and countermarch back to the Shunpike - a fourteen-mile march to a battle that was five miles away. After the battle was over the fingerpointing began and Wallace was the scapegoat. "What If?" Wallace had chosed the right road? He might have continued on with what was then a meteoric military career and never have written Ben-Hur. That doesn't sound so history-changing until you consider that "Ben-Hur marked a radical change in American letters, as millions of Americans for the first time felt that reading fiction was neither sacrilegious nor the sole esoteric pursuit of intellectuals, but was rightly intended for the secular enjoyment and edification of common people. Lew Wallace, as it turned out, introduced more Americans to reading than any other author of the nineteenth century...But more importantly, Wallace's novel began the strange nexus in American life, for good or ill, between literature, motion pictures, advertising, and popular culture. The novel led to the stage and then to the movies, but in the process it spun out entire ancillary industries of songs, skits, ads, clothes, and fan clubs, ensuring that within fifty years of its publication, nearly every American had heard the word 'Ben-Hur' without necessarily ever reading the book."

Thomas Fleming's "The Northwest Conspiracy" examines the Copperhead movement that flared up in some of the states that were carved out of the Northwest Territory - Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. Fleming envisions a civil war within the Civil War, another confederacy of seceded states, and an irreparable Union. It's interesting reading, but I'm not sure if I buy it. His thesis is that the people of these states could have risen up against the oppressive measures undertaken by the Federal government to keep these states in line. The Federal government did a mighty fine job of keeping the people in line in these states and elsewhere (Maryland). And Lincoln was fixated on keeping Kentucky in the Union. He once stated that losing Kentucky would be about the same as losing the entire game. He would have used any means necessary to keep Kentucky in the Union and the other states would have fallen in line.

James McPherson's essay explores the unusual chain of circumstances surrounding Robert E. Lee's lost order. During Lee's Maryland Invasion, a copy of Special Orders No. 191, a detailed order showing the disposition and movements of Lee's forces, was found by Union soldiers in a field where it had been dropped by a careless Confederate commander. Until then McClellan had been floundering around trying to ascertain Lee's motives, but this extraordinary stroke of luck (which included a Union officer on the scene who was familiar with and confirmed the handwritting of Lee's adjutant, Robert H. Chilton) allowed McClellan to get the jump on Lee and turn back the invasion at the Battle of Antietam. If not for the lost order, McCullough envisions the invasion continuing on into Pennsylvania, the Confederates taking the high ground at Gettysburg and fighting the battle in October, 1862 (nine months before it actually happened.) He spins this "What If?" out even further: McClellan is killed while trying to rally his men, the Union Army of the Potomac is destroyed, and Lee's Army of Northern Virginia marches unopposed on Washington. European recognition and Southern independence are the result. I agree with McPherson's point that this scenario is "much more in line with the laws of probability" than what actually happened. "The odds against the sequence of events that led to the loss and finding and verification of these orders must have been a million to one."

Jay Winik ponders the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the end of the war? "How did America avoid the cruel chain of history that consigns far too many civil wars to more turmoil and more bloodshed? How did America not become like the Balkans, or Northern Ireland, or the Middle East?" Winik gives a lot of credit where it is due - to Robert E. Lee, who ignored the advice of many (including President Jefferson Davis) and refused to scatter his defeated army into the hills to fight a guerrilla war. But what might have happened if John Wilkes Booth's plan had succeeded completely and Vice President Andrew Johnson had also been assassinated? There was no clear line of presidential succession at the time. Control of the government would have probably been put on the shoulders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Winik paints a "What If?" picture of military rule, riots, chaos, anarchy, a generation of bloodshed. He envisions that Northern anger would have risen out of control and Lee would have had no choice but to approve guerrilla operations. He has Lee dying in prison and Southerners continuing the war for years with the battle-cry "Remember Bobby Lee." As with the McCullough essay, what really happened was even stranger: "In the end, defying the odds of history, all the pieces would tumble into place: after running the government for nearly a day, the secretary of war and the cabinet, would show remarkable discipline and foresight and turn the government over to Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a man widely written off as a drunk and a buffoon, and a man whom nobody had ever thought of as being presidential material. Robert E. Lee, now safely back in Richmond, would again, quite publicly, spurn any temptation for guerrilla war; rejecting it for all the Confederacy to see, including Davis, he instead called on all Southerners to become good Americans (in short order, the remaining Confederate generals in the field, as well as guerrillas, would follow Lee's example, and not that of the bitter-ender, Jefferson Davis). Lincoln's call for magnanimity and the spirit of Appomattox would prevail over the calls for harshness and revenge; in short order, America would become one.
"But it had been so close."