Page 366 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Douglas’s plan of popular sovereignty because it broke with precedents for federal containment
or control of the growth of slavery. After trying to rally Free-Soilers around the Whig standard, 15.1
Lincoln threw in his lot with the Republicans, became leader of the new party in Illinois, attracted
national attention in his bid for Douglas’s Senate seat in 1858, and had the right qualifications
when the Republicans chose a presidential nominee in 1860. that he had split rails with an axe as 15.2
a young man was used in the campaign to show that he was a man of the people.
After Lincoln’s election provoked southern secession and plunged the nation into the great-
est crisis in its history, many people were skeptical of his abilities: Was he up to the responsibilities 15.3
he faced? Lincoln had less experience relevant to a wartime presidency than any previous or future
chief executive; he had never been a governor, senator, cabinet officer, vice president, or high-
ranking military officer. But his training as a prairie politician would prove useful in the years ahead.
Lincoln was also an effective war leader because he identified wholeheartedly with the 15.4
northern cause and could inspire others to make sacrifices for it. In his view, the issue in the con-
flict was nothing less than the survival of the kind of political system that gave men like himself a
chance for high office.
The Civil War put on trial the very principle of democracy at a time when most european
nations had rejected political liberalism and accepted the conservative view that popular govern-
ment would inevitably collapse into anarchy. It also showed the shortcomings of a purely white
man’s democracy and brought the first hesitant steps toward black citizenship. As Lincoln put it
in the Gettysburg Address in 1863, the only cause great enough to justify the enormous sacrifice
of life on the battlefields was the struggle to preserve and extend the democratic ideal, to ensure
that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

the Storm Gathers

15.1 What developments and events drew the Union toward Civil War?
L incoln’s election provoked the secession of seven states of the Deep South but
did not lead immediately to armed conflict. Before the sectional quarrel would
turn from a cold war into a hot one, two things had to happen: A final effort to
defuse the conflict by compromise and conciliation had to fail, and the North
needed to develop a firm resolve to maintain the Union by military action.

the Deep South Secedes

South Carolina, which had long been in the forefront of southern rights and pro-
slavery agitation, was the first state to secede. On December 20, 1860, a convention
in Charleston declared unanimously that “the union now subsisting between South
Carolina and other states, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby
dissolved.” The constitutional theory behind secession was that the Union was a
“ compact” among sovereign states, each of which could withdraw from it by the vote of
a convention similar to the one that had ratified the Constitution in the first place. The
South Carolinians justified secession by charging that “a sectional party” had elected a
president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
Other states of the Cotton Kingdom felt similar outrage at Lincoln’s election but
less certainty about how to respond to it. Cooperationists, who believed the slave cooperationists Southerners in
states should act as a unit, opposed those who advocated immediate secession by each 1860 who advocated secession by
state individually. If the cooperationists had triumphed, secession would have been the South as a whole rather than
delayed until a southern convention had agreed on it. Some of these moderates hoped unilateral secession by each state.
to extort major concessions from the North and thus remove the need for dissolving
the Union. But South Carolina’s unilateral action weakened their cause.
Elections for delegates to secession conventions in six other Deep South states
were hotly contested. Cooperationists did well in Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. But
secessionists won a majority in every state. By February 1, six other states had left the
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