A Youth's History of the Great Civil War
Van Evrie, Horton & Co., ©1866
Revised edition, ©2006 www.ronie-mooney-encs.us
The views expressed in the following document do not necessarily represent the views of www.ronie-mooney-encs.us. This document, originally published in 1866, has been provided to the public based solely on its potential value as a historical document.
CHAPTER VI. THE ELECTION OF LINCOLN
I HAVE already shown you that there has been, here in the North, ever since the formation of the Federal Government, a powerful party opposed to the Union as it was formed. But during all this long period, there was never a single statesman in the Southern States who was not devoted in favor of the Union as it was organized by our patriotic forefathers. The South was united in its admiration of the principles of government on which the Union was founded. On this subject the North was divided. The Democratic party was attached to the Union, and was devoted to the principles on which it was established, while the Black Republican party was an enemy both to the Union and the Constitution.
These Black Republicans, for many years, used to mockingly call Democrats "Union-savers." But as I have said, there were also two factions among the Black Republicans themselves - one, that of the fanatical abolitionists, and the other, the enemy of the democratic form of government, as you have seen in the history of the old Federalists. This latter faction was an adherent to the exploded monarchical principles of Alexander Hamilton. They wanted to destroy these States and establish one great despotic government,or empire, over all this country. Their plan was foreshadowed in a speech by Governor Banks of Massachusetts, in 1856, in which he said: "I can conceive of a time when this Constitution shall not be in existence - when we shall have an absolute dictatorial government,* transmitted from age to age, with men at its head who are made rulers by military commission, or who claim an hereditary right to govern those over whom they are placed."
When the war broke out, this same Governor Banks became a general, and in a speech made at Arlington Heights, he pointed to the Capitol in Washington, and said: "When this war is over, that will be the Capitol of a great nation. Then there will be no longer New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, etc., but we shall all be simply Americans."
The meaning was that the war would result in the destruction of all the State governments, and consolidate them into one great despotic government. The same idea was expressed by Senator Cameron, at a public dinner in Washington at about the same time.
But both of these factions - that is, the abolitionists and the disciples of Hamiltonian monarchism, were agreed in their desire of revolutionizing the Government. Nothing that the South could have done, short of an entire surrender of their institutions and their rights as States, could have satisfied them. The people of the Southern States honestly believed that their society and their lives would not be safe in the Union as administered by these men. The presidential campaign, which resulted in the election of Mr. Lincoln, had been conducted with such a spirit of violence and malignity towards the South that it might well alarm the people of that section. An infamous and murderous work, known as the "Helper Book," which had been published one year before, and a hundred thousand copies of it circulated by subscription of the leading Black Republican members of Congress, was the chief document of the Lincoln canvass. This horrid book plainly threatened the people of the South with assassination and death. It was full of such sentences as the following:
"Against slaveholders as a body we wage an exterminating war."
It counseled the North - "So not reserve the strength of your arms until you are rendered powerless to strike."
"We contend that slaveholders are more criminal than common murderers."
"The negroes, nine cases out of ten, Would be delighted at the opportunity to cut their masters, throats."
"Small pox is a nuisance; strychnine is a nuisance; mad dogs are a nuisance; slavery is a nuisance; and so are slaveholders; it is our business, nay, it is our imperative duty, to abate nuisances; we propose, therefore, with the exception of strychnine, to exterminate this catalogue from beginning to end."
A book of three hundred pages filled with such horrid threats as these, and circulated as a campaign document in the canvass that elected Mr. Lincoln, might well fill the South with alarm. I have said that all the leading Black Republican members of Congress subscribed for the free distribution of one hundred thousand copies of this work. Mr Seward gave it his especial endorsement, in a card which declared it "A work of great merit." The book had been preceded by speeches from Northern politicians scarcely less brutal in tone. Mr Giddings, a prominent politician in Ohio, had said:
"I look forward to a day when I shall see a servile insurrection in the South. When the black men, supplied with bayonets, shall wage a war of extermination against the whites - when the master shall see his dwelling in flames, and his hearth polluted, and though I may not mock at their calamity and laugh when their fear commeth, yet I shall hail it as the dawn of a political millenium."
The Hon. Erastus Hopkins had said: "If peaceful means fail us, and we are driven to the last extremity, when ballots are useless, then we will make bullets effective."
For many years Northern pulpits and Northern newspapers had teemed with such bloody threats as these against the people of the South. And less than two years before the election of Mr. Lincoln, "Old John Brown," a notorious murderer from Kansas, who was a native of New England, went into Virginia with a posse of assassins, for the purpose of getting up an insurrection among the negroes, to murder the white men, women and children. Brown's gang was armed with pikes made in New England, and with plenty of ammunition and fire-arms purchased by money secretly contributed in the North. The whole plot was discovered, and he was tried and hanged. The execution of this admitted assassin produced a fearful outbreak of threats and fury in the North. Prayer-meetings were held in nearly all the churches of New England, and indeed throughout the West, to invoke the vengeance of heaven on those who had caused the just penalties of the law to fall upon one of the most pitiless murderers ever known in this country. And yet bells were tolled to glorify the memory of this fiend.
As my readers may not have heard of Brown's terrible murder of Mr. Doyle and his two sons in Kansas, I will relate it. He went to the house about midnight with a gang of men, and told him that he and his two sons were wanted as witnesses upon an "Investigating Committee," and that they had been sent to summon them. No sooner had they got them in the yard than they killed all three in cold blood. The poor heart-broken wife and mother of the murdered men went almost crazy with grief, when the fiends returned to the house and threatened to shoot herself and only son. Mrs. Doyle fell on her bended knees, and implored for mercy for herself and only child. After a while the villains left the poor woman and her son to the sorrowful sight of the three corpses in their door yard.
At a meeting in Massachusetts, attended by United States Senator Henry Wilson, the following resolution was unanimously passed:
"Resolved, that it is the right and duty of slaves to resist their masters, and the right and duty of the people of the North to incite them to resistance, and to aid them in it."
At Rochford, Illinois, a public meeting, called by the leading citizens, unanimously "Resolved that the city bells be tolled one hour in commemoration of John Brown."
Horace Greeley said: "Let no one doubt that history will accord an honorable niche to old John Brown."
Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that the hanging of this assassin "made the gallows as glorious as the cross."
Again said Emerson : "Our Captain Brown is, happily,a representative of the American Republic. He did not believe in moral suasion, but in putting things through."
This terrible temper pervaded the whole North. A book of a thousand pages might be made of extracts from sermons, prayers, speeches and newspapers, of a similar character.
Can we wonder that, under such a state of things, the Southern people should have felt it necessary to take some steps for their own safety? In the midst of this wild excitement Mr. Lincoln was nominated for the presidency by the party which had so universally endorsed old John Brown's murderous raid into Virginia. He was nominated at Chicago, in a temporary edifice built for the purpose, and, as if indicating the designs of the party, called a "wigwam." Over the chair of the president of the nominating convention was placed a huge wooden knife twelve feet long, a fitting foreshadowing of the bloody designs of the party putting him forward. At least the people of the South so interpreted it; and they demanded some pledges, that the threats put forth in the Helper book should not be visited upon them.
In answer to these reasonable demands, they received only sneers, reproaches, and more threats. When they declared that "unless they could have their rights in the Union they would withdraw," they were answered, that "the North could not kick them out of the Union." The truth is, that war was resolved upon by the Black Republican leaders. I shall show you in another chapter what cunning tricks were resorted to by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward to bring about what was called "an overt Act" on the part of the South.
If I failed to lay this whole matter out truly before you, I should make myself a party to the monstrous falsehoods which have been put forth as history on this point. The whole Southern people had always been contented with the union as it was established by our forefathers. They never talked of secession, except as a remedy for aggressions upon their constitutional rights. On the contrary, in the North, as you have seen, there has always been a busy and determined party, which has been working to overthrow the Union, because it hated the Constitution, and was at enmity with the South from an old grudge, growing out of the early conflict between the monarchical principles of Alexander Hamilton and the democratic principles of Thomas Jefferson. This old hatred on the part of the North, which had been brewing and smouldering ever since the establishment of the Government, was now recruited by the fiery and fanatical element of abolition to such a degree that the conflict, long threatened by the Northern malcontents, and dreaded by the South, burst upon the country. Failing, as they thought, to receive any guarantees of security and rest in the Union, the Southern States determined to withdraw. All but South Carolina came to this conclusion slowly and unwillingly.
Return to History of the Great Civil War
RELATED ARTICLES
Election of 1860
The Presidential Election of 1860 Includes graphs, history and state by state results. ... California, Abraham Lincoln, 38733, 32.3, Stephen Douglas, 37999
The American President: Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) ... Lincoln lost that election, but his spectacular performance against Douglas in a series of nationally covered debates made ...
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, ... Lincoln's victory in that election thus changed the racial future of the United States.
United States presidential election, 1860 - Wikipedia
In 1860, this issue finally came to a head, bringing Abraham Lincoln and the ... The election of Lincoln made South Carolina's secession from the United ...
Biography of Abraham Lincoln
Biography of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States ... Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end ...
Election of Lincoln
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 is commonly viewed as the beginning of a chain of events that erupted into civil war in April 1861
Abraham Lincoln
In the year 1860, there was great excitement in Richmond over the election of Mr. Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States....
Abraham Lincoln - 16th President of the United States
This page contains links to a number of Abraham Lincoln Presidential ... 1860 & 1864 Campaign and Election History · Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 ...
Election of 1864
In early 1864 Lincoln felt he was unlikely to win re-election, the war had not yet ... Delaware, Abraham Lincoln, 8155, 48.2, George McClellan, 8767, 51.8 ...
