The moderate Democrats who would neither fight nor favor slavery,nominated Douglas.The most peculiar group was the fourth.They included all those who would not join the Republicans for fear of the temper of the Abolition-members,but who were not promoters of slavery,and who distrusted Douglas.They had no program but to restore the condition of things that existed before the Nebraska Bill.About four million five hundred thousand votes were cast.Lincoln had less than two million,and all but about twenty-four thousand of these were in the Free States.However,the disposition of Lincoln's vote gave him the electoral college.He was chosen President by the votes of a minority of the nation.But there was another minority vote which as events turned out,proved equally significant.Breckinridge,the symbol of the slave profiteers,and of all those whom they had persuaded to follow them,had not been able to carry the popular vote of the South.
They were definitely in the minority in their own section.The majority of the Southerners had so far reacted from the wild alarms of the beginning of the year that they refused to go along with the candidates of the extremists.They were for giving the Union another trial.The South itself had repudiated the slave profiteers.
This was the immensely significant fact of November,1860.It made a great impression on the whole country.For the moment it made the fierce talk of the Southern extremists inconsequential.Buoyant Northerners,such as Seward,felt that the crisis was over;that the South had voted for a reconciliation;that only tact was needed to make everybody happy.When,a few weeks after the election,Seward said that all would be merry again inside of ninety days,his illusion had for its foundation the Southern rejection of the slave profiteers.
Unfortunately,Seward did not understand the precise significance of the thought of the moderate South.He did not understand that while the South had voted to send Breckinridge and his sort about their business,it was still deeply alarmed,deeply fearful that after all it might at any minute be forced to call them back,to make common cause with them against what it regarded as an alien and destructive political power,the Republicans.This was the Southern reservation,the unspoken condition of the vote which Seward--and for that matter,Lincoln,also,--failed to comprehend.Because of these cross-purposes,because the Southern alarm was based on another thing than the standing or falling of slavery,the situation called for much more than tact,for profound psychological statesmanship.
And now emerges out of the complexities of the Southern situation a powerful personality whose ideas and point of view Lincoln did not understand.Robert Barnwell Rhett had once been a man of might in politics.Twice he had very nearly rent the Union asunder.In 1844,again in 1851,he had come to the very edge of persuading South Carolina to secede.In each case he sought to organize the general discontent of the South,--its dread of a tariff,and of Northern domination.After his second failure,his haughty nature took offense at fortune.He resigned his seat in the Senate and withdrew to private life.
But he was too large and too bold a character to attain obscurity.Nor would his restless genius permit him to rust in ease.During the troubled 'fifties,he watched from a distance,but with ever increasing interest,that negative Southern force which he,in the midst of it,comprehended,while it drifted under the wing of the extremists.As he did so,the old arguments,the old ambitions,the old hopes revived.In 1851his cry to the South was to assert itself as a Separate nation--not for any one reason,but for many reasons--and to lead its own life apart from the North.It was an age of brilliant though ill-fated revolutionary movements in Europe.Kossuth and the gallant Hungarian attempt at independence had captivated the American imagination.Rhett dreamed of seeing the South do what Hungary had failed to do.
He thought of the problem as a medieval knight would have thought,in terms of individual prowess,with the modern factors,economics and all their sort,left on one side.
"Smaller nations [than South Carolina],"he said in 1851,"have striven for freedom against greater odds."In 1860he had concluded that his third chance had come.He would try once more to bring about secession.To split the Union,he would play into the hands of the slave-barons.He would aim to combine with their movement the negative Southern movement and use the resulting coalition to crown with success his third attempt.Issuing from his seclusion,he became at once the overshadowing figure in South Carolina.Around him all the elements of revolution crystallized.He was sixty years old;seasoned and uncompromising in the pursuit of his one ideal,the independence of the South.His arguments were the same which he had used in 1844,in 1851:the North would impoverish the South;it threatens to impose a crushing tribute in the shape of protection;it seeks to destroy slavery;it aims to bring about economic collapse;in the wreck thus produced,everything that is beautiful,charming,distinctive in Southern life will be lost;let us fight!With such a leader,the forces of discontent were quickly,effectively,organized.Even before the election of Lincoln,the revolutionary leaders in South Carolina were corresponding with men of like mind in other Southern States,especially Alabama,where was another leader,Yancey,only second in intensity to Rhett.
The word from these Alabama revolutionists to South Carolina was to dare all,to risk seceding alone,confident that the other States of the South would follow.Rhett and his new associates took this perilous advice.The election was followed by the call of a convention of delegates of the people of South Carolina.This convention,on the twentieth of December,1860,repealed the laws which united South Carolina with the other States and proclaimed their own independent.
