Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

THE ELECTION IN KENTUCKY.

In the eager desire of the loyal people to hasten all measures of preparation for the defense of the Union, fault was found with Mr. Lincoln for so long postponing the session of Congress. Between the date of his proclamation and the date of the assembling of Congress, eighty days were to elapse. Zealous and impatient supporters of the loyal cause feared that the Confederacy would be enabled to consolidate its power, and to gather its forces for a more serious conflict than they could make if more promptly confronted with the power of the Union. But Mr. Lincoln judged wisely that time was needed for the growth and consolidation of Northern opinion, and that senators and representatives, after the full development of patriotic feeling in the free States, would meet in a frame of mind better suited to the discharge of the weighty duties devolving upon them. An additional and conclusive reason with the President was, that Kentucky had not yet elected her representatives to the Thirty-seventh Congress, and would not do so, under the constitution and laws, until the ensuing August. Mr. Lincoln desired to give ample time for canvassing Kentucky for the special election, which was immediately ordered by the governor of the State for the twentieth of June. From the first, Mr. Lincoln had peculiar interest in the course and conduct of Kentucky. It was his native State, and Mr. Clay had been his political exemplar and ideal. He believed also that in the action of her people would be found the best index and the best test of the popular opinion of the Border slave States. He did every thing therefore that he could properly do, to aid Kentucky in reaching a conclusion favorable to the Union. He was rewarded with a great victory. Of the ten representatives chosen, nine were decided friends of the Union, with the venerable Crittenden at their head, ably seconded by Robert Mallory and William H. Wadsworth. Only one member, Henry C. Burnett, was disloyal to the government, and he, after a few months' tarry in the Union councils, went South and joined the Rebellion. The popular vote showed 92,365 for the Union candidates, and 36,995 for the Secession candidates, giving a Union majority of more than 55,000. Mr. Lincoln regarded the result in Kentucky as in the highest degree auspicious, and as amply vindicating the wisdom of delaying the extra session of Congress. The effect was to stimulate a rapidly developing loyalty in the western part of Virginia, to discourage rebellious movements in Missouri, and to arrest Disunion tendencies in Maryland.

Under the protection of the administration, and inspired by the confidence of its support, the Union men of Kentucky had done for that State what her Union men might have done for Tennessee if John Bell and his Whig associates had been as bold and as true to their old principles and John J. Crittenden and Garrett Davis had proved in Kentucky. The conduct of Mr. Bell was a sad surprise to his Northern friends, and a keen mortification to those Southern Whigs who had remained firm in their attachment to the Union. The vote which he had received in the South at the Presidential election was very nearly as large as that given to Breckinridge. The vote of Bell and Douglas united, exceeded that given to Breckinridge in the slave States by more than a hundred thousand. The popular judgment in the North had been that the Disunion element in the South was massed in support of Breckinridge, and that all who preferred the candidacy of Bell or Douglas might be relied upon in the supreme crisis as friends of the Union. Two Southern States, Kentucky and Tennessee, had given popular majorities for Mr. Bell, and there was no reason for supposing that the Union sentiment of Tennessee was any less pronounced than that of Kentucky. Indeed, Tennessee had the advantage of Mr. Bell's citizenship and long identification with her public service, while Kentucky encountered the personal influence and wide-spread popularity of Mr. Breckinridge, who took part against the Union.

If Mr. Bell had taken firm ground for the Union, the Secession movement would have been to a very great extent paralyzed in the South. Mr. Badger of North Carolina, of identically similar principles with Crittenden, could have given direction to the old Whig sentiment of his State, and could have held it steadily as Kentucky was held to the Union. The Bell and Everett campaign had been conducted upon the single and simple platform of the Union and the Constitution,—devotion to the Union, obedience to the Constitution. Mr. Everett, whose public life of grace, eloquence, and purity had not been especially distinguished for courage, pronounced with zeal and determination in favor of Mr. Lincoln's administration, and lent his efforts on the stump to the cause of the Union with wonderful effect through the Northern States. The eagerness of Virginia Democrats never could have swept their State into the whirlpool of Secession if the supporters of Mr. Bell in Tennessee and North Carolina had thrown themselves between the Old Dominion and the Confederacy. With that aid, the former Whigs of Virginia, led by Stuart and Botts and Wickham and Baldwin, and united with the loyal Democrats of the mountain and the valley, could have held the State firmly to the support of the Union, and could have effectively nullified the secret understanding between Mr. Mason and the Montgomery government, that Virginia should secede as soon as her open co-operation was needed for the success of the Southern revolt.

THE WHIGS OF THE SOUTH.

A large share of the responsibility for the dangerous development of the Rebellion must therefore be attributed to John Bell and his half million Southern supporters, who were all of the old Whig party. At the critical moment they signally failed to vindicate the principles upon which they had appealed in the preceding canvass for popular support. They are not justly chargeable with original Disunion proclivities. Sentiments of that kind had been consolidated in the Breckinridge party. But they are responsible for permitting a party whose rank and file did not outnumber their own to lead captive the public opinion of the South, and for permitting themselves to be pressed into a disavowal of their political principles, and to the adoption of the extreme views against which they had always warred. The precipitate manner in which the Southern men of the ancient Whig faith yielded their position as friends of the Union was an instructive illustration of the power which a compact and desperate minority can wield in a popular struggle. In a secret ballot, where every man could have voted according to his own convictions and desires, the Secession scheme would have been defeated in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. But the men who led the Disunion movement, understood the practical lesson taught by the French revolutionist, that "audacity" can overcome numbers. In such a contest conservatism always goes down, and radicalism always triumphs. The conservative wishes to temporize and to debate. The radical wishes to act, and is ready to shoot. By reckless daring a minority of Southern men raised a storm of sectional passion to which the friends of the Union bowed their heads and surrendered.

It would be incorrect to speak of a Whig party in the South at the outbreak of the civil war. There were many Whigs, but their organization was gone. It was the destruction of that party which had prepared the way for a triumph of the Democratic Disunionists. In the day of their strength the Whigs could not have been overborne in the South by the Secessionists, nor would the experiment have been tried. No party in the United States ever presented a more brilliant array of talent than the Whigs. In the South, though always resting under the imputation of not being so devoted to the support of Slavery as their opponents, they yet maintained themselves, by the power of intellect and by the prestige of chivalric leadership, in some extraordinary political battles. Many of their eminent men have a permanent place in our history. Others, with less national renown, were recognized at home as possessing equal power. In their training, in their habits of mind, in their pride and independence, in their lack of discipline and submission, they were perhaps specially fitted for opposition, and not so well adapted as men of less power, to the responsibility and detail of administration. But an impartial history of American statesmanship will give some of the most brilliant chapters to the Whig party from 1830 to 1850. If their work cannot be traced in the National statute-books as prominently as that of their opponents, they will be credited by the discriminating reader of our political annals as the English of to-day credit Charles James Fox and his Whig associates—for the many evils which they prevented.

[* Baillie Peyton is erroneously described as uniting with the
South. He remained true to the Union throughout the contest.]