Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

As we have noted, such prominent leading lights of the South as Vice President John Breckinridge and Senator Jefferson Davis opposed secession. These were men whose commitment to the South and to slavery was beyond question. Indeed, Breckinridge, who returned to the Senate following the end of President Buchanan’s term, remains the only member of that body to be declared a traitor (on December 6, 1861) for his decision to join the Confederate army. For his part, Davis thought secession such an error that his wife reported that upon learning he had been selected as president of the Confederate States of America (CSA), “He looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family. After a few minutes he told me like a man might speak of a sentence of death.”47 Still, of course, he did not turn down the invitation to lead the Confederacy, nor did he shy away from exploiting the opportunity it gave him to be a powerful and fulfilled politician. Having accepted the august office, and faced with secession as a fait accompli, Davis looked for a way to avoid war by offering to purchase any of the federal government’s property in the South, such as Fort Sumter. He also proposed that the CSA would assume the South’s share of the existing national debt. Lincoln, however, refused even to meet the delegation that Davis sent to Washington to offer terms.48 True to his conviction that the nation—including the South—would be all slave or all free, Lincoln would not entertain any compromise that meant preserving slavery in the South, whether outside the Union through secession (as suggested by Davis’s commissioners) or inside (as proposed by the Crittenden Compromise).

How could such powerful and highly respected southern political leaders lose the battle to prevent the secession they so deeply opposed? The short answer is that a group of southern newspapermen and politicians collectively known as fire-eaters, many from South Carolina, the first state to secede, maneuvered their compatriots into secession. A few of the key figures included Robert Barnswell Rhett, who long served in the House of Representatives and the Senate (from South Carolina); William Loundes Yancey, who served in the House (from Alabama) but for one term, like Lincoln; and Christopher Memminger who never rose beyond state-level politics in South Carolina (although he did become secretary of the treasury in the Confederate States of America). All adamantly opposed what they saw as northern efforts to destroy southern political influence. They were hostile to northern, Republican tariff policy and, of course, to antislavery policies. Just how extreme their views were is well illustrated by public declarations by William Yancey. He argued, contrary to the original restrictions in the Constitution: “If slavery is right per se, if it is right to raise slaves for sale, does it not appear that it is right to import them? . . . Let us then wipe from our statute book this mark of Cain which our enemies have placed there. . . . We want negroes [ sic ] cheap, and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.”49 These extremists wanted secession and they were willing to risk the dangers of war, rather than succumb to the immovable Lincoln or remain in what they perceived as an antislavery union.

Behind the efforts of Rhett, Memminger, and South Carolina governor Francis Wilkinson Pickens, the South Carolina assembly voted for secession on December 20, 1860, with other southern states following shortly after, especially following the Union defense of Fort Sumter. And so, the extremist fire-eaters in the South and the “extremist” Republicans in the North prevailed, each true to their core constituencies, and they brought the country to dissolution and war. But what if the cooler, antisecession heads of Davis and Breckinridge had succeeded?

Consider what would in all likelihood have happened had the antisecession southern leadership prevailed on their hot-headed extremist factions to bide their time and wait for the next presidential election. They, of course, would have reminded the hotheads that Lincoln had barely squeaked out a victory and that he did so because the southern interests had failed adequately to coordinate their efforts. Divided three ways, between Breckinridge, Bell, and Douglas, the door had been opened for the “extremist” Republicans to win, a mistake they would not make again in 1864. If Breckinridge (who carried the South in the election), together with Senator Davis, had persuaded their fellow proslavery, antitariff, states’ rights advocates to band together to block Lincoln’s agenda in the House of Representatives and the Senate rather than seceding, what would have happened?

Lincoln would have faced a Senate consisting of 33 states, 11 of which in actuality joined the Confederacy plus 2 others that were recognized by the Confederacy although they did not actually secede. To pass an amendment to the Constitution that would make the country all free—as he did—Lincoln would have needed two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate to vote for the amendment. Even when the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate (with the Confederate States, of course, not represented and therefore having no vote) on the eighth of April 1864, still 6 senators voted against it. Had the 11 states that made up the Confederate States of America not seceded, Lincoln would have faced a Senate consisting of 66 members. It is a safe bet that all the senators from the secessionist states would have voted against the amendment. Add to that the 6 who voted against in 1864 and Lincoln would have faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: 28 out of 66 members of the Senate would have voted nay; thus, he would only have had about 58 percent on his side. The amendment would have failed.

Let us bend over backward in Lincoln’s favor. Imagine by some clever maneuvering, which, after all, we know Lincoln, the smoke-filled-room politician, was good at, he somehow persuaded the six who we know voted against the amendment in 1864 to instead vote for it sometime during his first term without the backdrop of the war. As unlikely as that is, still he would not be home free. The Constitution requires that an amendment approved by two thirds of each house of Congress must then be ratified by three fourths of the states. As part of the terms of readmission to the Union following the Civil War, southern states were compelled to agree to the amendment, but of course, that lever would not have been available to Lincoln had the South not seceded in the first place. With 33 states he would have needed 25 to ratify, but none of the 11 Confederate states can have been expected to do so. Even if every remaining state had voted in favor—itself rather unlikely—Lincoln would have fallen well short of the three fourths needed to amend the constitution. So, at the end of his first term, what would he have had to point to as his successes?

It is likely, as the highly successful railroad lawyer that he was, that Lincoln would have nudged the states into agreeing to build the Transcontinental Railroad. He would have boasted that, contrary to the expectations of so many, he had in fact successfully kept the country together despite the deep divisions of the 1860 election. Besides boosting the economy through railroad construction, he would during his 1864 reelection campaign (if he got the Republican nomination) have pointed to the national banking system he put into place as well as significant protective tariffs. Of course, these policies would have played well with many northern industrial interests and some northwestern interests, but they would have been—as they had been—anathema to the southern states. And then, being a pragmatic “extremist,” he probably would have adopted a more moderate approach to the slavery question, thereby alienating many in the Republican Party who felt the urgency of eliminating slavery more keenly than Lincoln might have appeared to.