The Life Of Walter Q. Gresham
Chapter 7
Elected To Indiana Legisture
GRESHAM
A DELEGATE TO REPUBLICAN STATE CONVENTION— CONTEST BETWEEN LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS
POLITICIANS
DIVISION OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY —
CHARLESTON CONVENTION— DEBATE
BETWEEN JEFFERSON DAVIS AND STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
NOMINATION OF DOUGLAS AT BALTIMORE —NOMINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT CHICAGO
CONVENTION
GRESHAM REPUBLICAN NOMINEE FOR
LEGISLATURE DEFEATS
HANCOCK—LINCOLN ELECTED
AS PRESIDENT.
In 1860 it was Kansas and
Nebraska again, with secession
threatened and plainly foreshadowed.
This year my husband was a
delegate to the Indiana Republican
State Convention that met February 22, and nominated Henry S. Lane
for Governor as a representative of the old line Whigs, and Oliver P.
Morton, who had once been a Democrat, for lieutenant governor, under an
agreement that, in the event of success, Lane should become United
States senator and Morton Governor. While the contest was on for first
place, Mr. Morton claiming it as of right because he had been the party
candidate for Governor in 1856, my husband was a supporter of Mr. Lane.
This convention elected my husband's friend, Judge William T. Otto, one
of the delegates to the Republican National Convention that had
been called to meet in Chicago. Walter Q. Gresham favored the
nomination of Salmon P. Chase. I have since frequently heard Judge Otto
tell how Caleb B. Smith imposed on Judge David Davis and Joseph Medill
when the latter during the convention was pledging everything in
sight to insure Mr. Lincoln's nomination. "Mr. Smith," Judge Otto said,
"made Judge Davis believe that the Indiana delegation would go to
Seward unless Smith was promised a
place in the cabinet; when the truth was that none of us cared for
Smith, and after we got to Chicago and looked over the ground all were
for Lincoln." That the pledge was made I have heard from Judge Davis's
own lips. That it was kept, everybody knows, for Caleb B. Smith became
the first Secretary of the Interior in Mr. Lincoln's cabinet. When the
time came for Walter Q. Gresham to make pledges as to membership in his
cabinet should he be nominated and elected, he refused to do so.
My father and the Louisville
Courier, the Secessionist organ, kept
constantly before us the question of secession and what the pro slavery
people would do in the event of the election of Senator Douglas or an
anti-slavery man. My father also brought us the views of the business
men of Louisville, whose sympathies, possibly because of their trade
being almost entirely with the South, were pro slavery and
Secessionist. As a matter of local pride, the business men of
Louisville favored the nomination by the Democrats in i860 of one of
their number, James Guthrie, who in addition to his other public
services had been Secretary of the Treasury under President Fillmore.
But he was a Union man at heart and had only the nominal support of the
Courier.
The Harneys were still for
Senator Douglas. George D. Prentice,
apparently without a candidate, had passed into the most dangerous of
the two classes of disunionists that Henry Clay, in 1850, said
threatened our country: "One is that which is open and undisguised in
favor of separation. The other is that which, disavowing a desire
for the dissolution of the Union, adopts a cause and contends for
measures and principles which must inevitably lead to that calamitous
result."
The Democratic party divided
at Charleston, May 3, 1860. When the
convention met April 23, although the Douglas people were in a
majority, the adjustment of the party machinery gave the pro slavery
element the control of the
Convention, and in the committee on resolutions a majority of one. The
differences were carried to the floor of the Convention, where the
Douglas people, by a vote of 165 to 138, substituted theirs, or the
minority report of the Committee on Resolutions, for that of the
majority, as the party platform.
The pro slavery people
insisted on their theory that as slaves were
recognized as property by the Federal constitution, and that as in
the Dred Scott case it had been held a slave could be taken to a
territory, therefore the legislative and executive branches of the
Federal government should protect slavery in the territories.
But the Douglas people
concluded, and the Dred Scott case did not
preclude the inference, for Scott had voluntarily returned with his
master from Minnesota Territory to Missouri, that in organizing a
territory as an embryonic State and vesting it with legislative power,
the legislature in representing the wishes of its constituents was
absolute and supreme in the control of the police power. It is a
doctrine supplemented by acts of Congress that is to-day giving the
Prohibitionists bone dry territory. But as it was then patent that
without the aid of an efficient police force there could be no
such thing as the actual enjoyment of slave property in a territory,
the Douglas platform ended with this proviso, that inasmuch as
differences of opinion had arisen as to the nature and extent of
the powers and duties of the Congress of the United States and the
territorial governments under the Constitution, over the institution of
slavery within the territories, they would abide by the decisions of
the Supreme Court of the United States on these questions.
Immediately upon the adoption
of the Douglas platform, the
delegates of Alabama, led by William L. Yancey, who had argued on the
floor of the convention that " Squatter Sovereignty" was
unconstitutional, all left the convention, followed by the delegates
from Mississippi, Louisiana,
South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas. to be followed the next
day by the delegates from Georgia. President Buchanan and his
officeholders were for anything "to beat" Douglas. There went with the
seceders, Senator James A. Bayard, one of the delegates from Delaware,
and William L. Whitney, then Collector of the Port of Boston and a
delegate from Massachusetts. He was the father of William C. Whitney,
afterwards Secretary of the Navy in Grover Cleveland's first cabinet,
and one of the most influential men in the second Cleveland
administration, although not an official member of it, and an
influential man in the Democratic Convention of 1896 at Chicago. The
elder Whitney's experience at this time may have made the son
conservative or timid. In 1896, William C. Whitney as the sound money
leader and his sound money followers sat mute instead of bolting, as
they subsequently did at the nomination of William Jennings Bryan.
The seceders, after organizing
as a convention and listening to
many fiery speeches, adjourned, without adopting a platform or
making a nomination, to meet in Richmond, Virginia, in June.
Though the membership was thus
reduced, still Senator Douglas could not
be nominated. Some of the seceders remained and insisted that the
two thirds rule was still in force and that it meant two thirds of 303.
the original roll of the Convention, and it was so ordered by a vote of
141 to 112. and then there was an adjournment, June 18.
June 2 the Douglas people nominated Stephen A. Douglas for
President and Hurschell B. Johnson of Georgia for Vice President. Seven
days later the seceders nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky for
President and Joseph Law of Oregon for Vice President. In the interim
the Republican and Union National Conventions met, and there was a
great debate between Jefferson Davis and Stephen A. Douglas in the
Senate of the United States. March 1, 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis,
with a view to anticipating the
action of the Charleston Convention, had introduced a series of
resolutions in the Senate of the United States setting forth the
pro slavery platform. But not until May 8 did he begin the discussion,
in a speech that ran for several days, with interruptions. He attacked
Senator Douglas and Squatter Sovereignty in the Charleston
platform; still he wanted to harmonize the conflicting elements and
intimated that the seceders should be readmitted at Baltimore. In
the senatorial caucus that followed, all but two of the Democratic
senators, Senator Douglas being
absent, sided with Senator Davis and
declared for his resolutions. May 15 and 16 Senator
Douglas replied.
On his side he quoted every
Democrat living and dead except John C.
Calhoun. Alone with Calhoun he classed the Senator from Mississippi. He
said: "Secession is treason and treason means war. It is the plan
of the seceders to break up the Union." In support of this
assertion he read W. L. Yancey's letter of June 15, 1858, in which he
proposed to break up the Union and form a Confederacy of the Cotton
States. Then said Senator Douglas: "The seceders would not at first
take in the border states . . . They would be left in the Union to
make a shield against the Abolitionist and as a protection to the new
Cotton Confederacy .... Not very flattering to my Virginia friends. And
what will Kentucky do, with the Canadian line moved down to her
borders, with no legal or moral obligation on the Abolitionists to
return her runaway slaves ?" He then paid a glowing tribute to the
patriotism of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, and warned Senator Davis
that if he was attacked again he would reply; otherwise he would
remain silent.
The thought that held Kentucky in line when the test came was, What
will be the effect on the Kentucky slave holder in the event of the
dissolution of the Union? Senator Douglas is entitled to the credit for
first advancing it. My husband adopted it instantly and as a Republican
used it with
telling effect in helping hold Kentucky in the Union. The women could
see the point. Carrie Taylor Harney said, " Those fools in the Cotton
States will lose us our niggers."
In his "Lost Cause," Mr. Davis says little about this debate with
Senator Douglas. It seems to have escaped the historians of the time,
but it is most important because, aside from other considerations, it
made every Douglas man a Union man, as was evidently Douglas's purpose.
During that Davis Douglas debate, the Louisville Democrat said: "The
seceders want to get back to the Baltimore Convention when it
assembles, but we are opposed to admitting them. We are well rid of
them. Those who applauded them climbing high will ridicule them
coming down."
Prentice argued in his paper that if it was lawful, and he said it
was, for a territorial legislature, by nonaction, to deny protection to
a slave holder, then Congress should legislate directly to protect the
slave holder. '' Congress cannot force the territorial legislature
to act, therefore Congress must control the Squatters. It is wrong
and immoral for Congress not to do so. No territorial legislature will
make laws to protect slavery; Congress must make them. ... If the
legislature be unfriendly to slavery, then the Federal government must
interfere and nullify such legislation."
Harney answered: "This effort to render slavery so far national as to
put any phase of it at the discretion of Congress is a work of
political insanity in the South.
"For our own part we wash our hands of this sectional movement. The
Northern democracy have granted all we have a right to ask. They held
back the Federal government, after a desperate struggle, from
saying that the people of a territory should not have slavery if they
wanted it. They will not say to the people of a territory, 'You shall
have slavery, however much you are opposed to it which is the whole
substance of the majorities resolutions. They ought not to say it and
we ought not to ask them to say it."
And as conclusive statement against the wisdom of secession, Major
Harney said: "Kansas flaunts her anti-slavery code in your face and you
cannot change it. Congress cannot change it, the President cannot
change it. . . . New Mexico adopts her slave code and our Black
Republicans won't dare to repeal it.
Only on one occasion was there anything like bitterness in any of Mr.
Gresham's discussions with my father, and that was when, in reply to an
assertion of my father that the Republicans were inclined to be
proscriptive of the foreign born citizens, my husband said: "Most of
the foreign born citizens on arrival in this country join the party
that is dominated by the slave power and is opposed to the rule of the
people in the territories. If an Irishman or German cannot support the
Republican policy with reference to the territories he certainly ought
to support Senator Douglas. He is only insisting on what your father
was driven out of Ireland for, demanding that the Irishman rule in
Ireland. The Virginians are now justifying the existence of slavery in
Virginia because they say the British government, against the wishes of
the early colonists, foisted slavery and the slave trade upon them.
What possible justification, then, can there now be for the Virginians
and Kentuckians to insist that all the power of the Federal government
shall be wielded in Kansas to make that territory a Slave State against
the wishes of the settlers there?"
While in Mr. Arthur's cabinet in 1883, in a discussion between my
husband and Mr. Blaine about Stephen A. Douglas and his debates with
Jefferson Davis in i860, Mr. Blaine said Douglas was the best debater
America ever produced, but he had no wit. Speaking about Delaware at
Charleston, Senator Douglas said: "Little Delaware is
too small to divide, so Senator Bayard will come back." Not bad for a
man devoid of wit!
Mr. Gresham said what Mr. Blaine did not like: "We all soon came to
Douglas's position on 'Squatter Sovereignty.' Other men may have
been the orators and the statesmen of the Union cause, but Douglas was
its lawyer. From a constitutional and legal standpoint he justified the
use of force to maintain the Union."
I have visited many Union as well as Confederate soldiers' homes.
To me they all are saddening. The number of suicides among the
veterans, the truth of which the authorities suppressed, was
frightful.
After talking themselves out on the war, there is nothing to do
but await the grim reaper. See that old fellow sitting alone glum and
morose. Never was there a more pitiful object. Soon he anticipates
Nature. One of the saddest of all places was Beauvoir. Jefferson
Davis's last home, now a Confederate Mississippi Soldiers' Home.
Nowhere was I ever more kindly treated and nowhere did my heart
more go out in sympathy for the bronzed and grizzled veteran who
fought so gallantly under such able leadership in the field. They all
talked as though they knew my husband and they all remembered Douglas.
One said to me, after I had remarked that war is a crime against
civilization, "But Douglas took away our Constitution." "Yes," I
replied, "and he said it was his Constitution." "But look how we
suffered," he answered. "And think how I suffered," I said. "For over a
year I had a wounded husband in bed. Think of the anxious days and the
sleepless nights of the women, while you fellows were having a good
time, and then tell me if you men should go to war over a
constitutional question. A few speeches were made, drums were
beat, and you were in line. And which side you were on, most of you
say, whether 'Yank' or 'Reb,' all depended on which side of the Mason
and Dixon line you were born." Not a sufficient reason at all for
fighting but a most conclusive reason for getting
together.
Mississippi's prohibition in 1832 on the further importation
of
slaves at least gives color to the statement of Jefferson Davis that he
went out for a theory of government and not a principle of morals,
and supports my conclusion. that different management might have ended
slavery without bloodshed. Indeed, after the five presidential
tickets were in the field in i860, Mr. Davis says he sought out Senator
Douglas, and saying he was authorized to speak for Bell and Everett, as
well as his own people, proposed an accommodation. But Douglas was
implacable, and the "Black Republicans" in less than a year, as we have
before remarked, adopted his Squatter Sovereignty. Of all the men of
his time, Douglas alone was consistent from start to finish.
Involved in Douglas's theory of government was the destruction of
slavery. My Irish compatriot, the Confederate General Patrick R.
Cleburne, saw it. The preservation of the Union, "Pat" said, meant
the destruction of slavery. That was the theory of Dennis Pennington,
of Henry Clay, and of Walter Q. Gresham. "Let us beat them to it,"
argued General Cleburne to President Davis, "put the negro with him in
our ranks, and with him fighting for his beloved South and his
home, we will gain our independence." Read the letter of Robert Dale
Owen to Secretary Chase of November 10, 1862, in which Mr. Owen urged
on the National Government that if the negro remained loyal to the
Confederacy the South would gain her independence. When too late the
Confederate chieftain adopted the Irishman's advice.
The Union party, on May 19, at
Baltimore, nominated John Bell of
Tennessee for President and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for
Vice President, on a very brief platform, which simply declared
that it recognized no political principles other than the Constitution
of the country, the union of States, and the enforcement of laws.
George
D. Prentice, whose extreme pro slavery views in the Louisville
Journal tended to impeach the good faith of the Bell and Everett
movement, supported it with extraordinary sagacity. Although
Breckenridge was then Vice President and senator elect from Kentucky,
Prentice, with the support of patriots like John J. Crittenden, whose
all was sacrificed, swung Kentucky to Bell and Everett. Breckenridge
was attacked for having, as late as 1859, supported the Douglas
doctrine of non-intervention in the territories, while "John Bell has
always been against it." To catch the Democrats, Prentice told how John
Bell had been reared in Andrew Jackson's school, and to get the Whigs
he said that in 1850 Henry Clay had recommended Bell for a place in
Fillmore's cabinet.
While Senator Douglas was
answering Jefferson Davis, the Republican
party, May 16, at Chicago, was nominating Abraham Lincoln for President
and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for Vice President.
The Republican platform deprecated the centralization tendencies of the
Buchanan administration and of the pro slavery party; denied the right
of secession and demanded the immediate admission of Kansas as a Free
State under the free constitution which the people of Kansas had
adopted. While it disclaimed any intention to attempt to interfere with
the domestic institutions of the States, it claimed all the territory
of the United States should be free, and said the Declaration of
Independence should be adhered to as a means of interpreting the
Constitution of the United States, and especially that clause of the
Fifth Amendment, namely, "that no person shall be deprived of life,
liberty, or property without due process of the law.'' It was under
this identical clause of the Fifth Amendment that the slave holder
claimed protection for his property.
Lincoln argued that the word "slave" was not used in the Federal
Constitution to exclude the idea that there could be property in man,
but Wendell Phillips told the slave holder that while the word " slave
"
was not in the Constitution there were
other words that meant exactly the same thing.
In July, i860, Walter Q. Gresham was nominated by the Republicans as
their candidate in Harrison County for the lower branch of the
legislature. His opponent, William Hancock, was a man of character and
ability. They had joint discussions all over the county. All the legal,
constitutional, and moral questions involved in the slavery
question were discussed in every schoolhouse in the county. All
the Davises, most of whom were Democrats, voted for him. They liked his
morals and were satisfied with his pledges to support the Constitution
and laws, a pledge made by every Republican speaker that year, but
unfortunately there was doubt in the minds of many of the pro slavery
people as to the sincerity of these pledges.
Many of the old line Democrats from Virginia and Kentucky voted
for my husband. A young Virginian, William N. Tracewell, afterwards an
able and prominent lawyer, who remained a Democrat to his dying day,
not only voted for him but was active in his interest. Gresham defeated
Hancock by sixty votes, the vote being Gresham 1,797, Hancock 1,737.
For Lane and Morton for governor and lieutenant governor, there
were 1,691 votes; for Hendricks and Turpie, the Democratic candidates,
1,876. In the November election for presidential electors, the vote in
Harrison County for Douglas and Johnson was 1,848; for Lincoln and
Hamlin, 1,593; for Breckenridge and Lane, 36; for Bell and Everett,
17. In the nation, of the popular vote, Mr. Lincoln received
1,865,913; Mr. Douglas, 1,374,664; Mr.
Breckenridge, 848,404; Mr. Bell, 591,900.