Search Results

This chapter focuses on the presidential election of 1860 in Knoxville. It opens with a vignette of a famous encounter between William G. Brownlow and Alabama “Fire Eater” William Lowndes Yancey, a US Senator and one of the leading proponents of Southern secession should a Republican president be elected. Their encounter offers a framework for addressing the Second Party System as it functioned in Knoxville, and for exploring two themes utterly central to the way in which the townspeople contemplated the impending election: speculation as to the fate of slavery, and debate concerning the fate of white men. Developing these themes, the chapter explores East Tennessee's modest antislavery heritage and the evidence of class stratification in Knoxville and its environs. It argues that these factors rendered the proslavery argument that Parson Brownlow modeled during the secession crisis inherently unstable.

This chapter probes the presidential contest of 1860 between four major candidates: Democrat Stephen Douglas; Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge; Republican Abraham Lincoln; and Constitutional Unionist John Bell. The chapter demonstrates that in spite of the political polarization within the nation and the ill-effects of John Brown’s raid, the moderate, middle ground political outlook of most white border southerners remarkably endured. The chapter contains a close inspection of each major party’s political activity within the Border South in the months before the election of 1860. It also includes a close analysis of the election results in both the presidential election and the 1860 Missouri gubernatorial election to demonstrate the staying power of the Border South’s moderate political notion.

This chapter examines attempts to translate the appeal of Unionism into politics, and Everett’s role in those efforts. It analyses the nature and importance of mass Union meetings held in dozens of Northern towns and cities to denounce John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and to reassure Southerners of Northerners’ attachment to the Union. It analyses the platform and prospects of the Constitutional Union Party—with Everett as its vice presidential nominee—in the election of 1860, explaining its demise by the other parties’ leveraging of the Union appeal. It then illustrates Everett’s confused reaction to the secession of seven Southern states, a confusion typical of citizens throughout the remaining Union states.

Chapter 1 provides the backdrop to disunion and warfare. It chronicles slave life and the impact of slavery on Ozarks society in the tense decade preceding the outbreak of war. Using the nomenclature introduced by historian Ira Berlin, the chapter argues that the Ozark region as a whole was a “society with slaves,” but that pockets of “slave society” existed within it. The chapter also illustrates the conflicted nature of both white and Native American Ozarks society as it related to the slavery issue.

This chapter discusses the campaign strategies of the two main presidential candidates in the free states in the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Both appealed to voters’ desire to contain the Slave Power and assure access to the West for free white settlers. The core difference between Douglasites and Lincolnites was over the role of the Federal government in resolving the crisis: Republicans wanted to take control in Washington to prevent the nationalisation of slavery; Democrats continued to believe that the most effective solution was decentralisation.

The open national conflict over slavery drew the West into the vortex of events during the 1850s. In the final antebellum decade, political fault lines compromised the former regional consensus as increasing numbers of white residents aligned for and against slavery. The moderate regional variants of the national parties, including the new Republican Party born in the region, were challenged by sectionalized platforms. Despite the region’s slave states having comparatively few bondpeople, the democratic contours of slaveholding altered their political economy to defend the peculiar institution against “northern” agitators, namely abolitionists. Each successive controversy sent shock waves through the region and complicated the western consensus. But it did not yet fully sectionalize it, evidenced by voters’ response to the outcome of the 1860 presidential election that polarized the North and South politically and ideologically.

This chapter examines the genesis of the unlikely Lincoln-Seward foreign policy partnership. Attention is given to their respective childhoods and educational opportunities, marriages, family lives, and legal careers. Both men gravitated to politics and moved from the Whig to Republican Party in the 1850s. Despite Seward’s much greater political prominence and success, Lincoln was selected as the Republican nominee for president in 1860 and went on to win the general election. Lincoln then made Seward his secretary of state, established his status as senior partner, and instituted his one-war policy as the administration responded to the South’s secession from the Union.