“Old ape,” “ignorant baboon”—these were the favorite flings of the Southern Democrats. He was pictured as a raw, coarse, brutal and reckless “nigger lover,” filled with hatred of the slave States, eager to rob them of their legitimate property, a half-horse-half-alligator, unfit to enter a polite house or associate with gentlemen, and almost insane with the murderous fanaticism of the New England abolitionists.
If Lincoln felt the sting of this cruel satire he gave no sign of it. So humble was his nature that, after his election, he grew a beard at the suggestion of a little girl, who wrote to say that it might make him look better. He wrote this during the Presidential campaign:
“If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair and gray eyes—No other marks or brands recollected. A. Lincoln.”
He was silent in the face of pitiless abuse and carricature, yet he sent many confidential letters, advising, encouraging, admonishing the Republican leaders. While his supporters carried fence-rails in processions and shouted hosannahs, he quietly directed matters from his home.
And, although he would sometimes laugh with a pure humor that bubbled up unconsciously from his blameless nature, as the strain of the political campaign increased, the tragic sadness of his countenance deepened, for his keen eyes began to see the awful significance of the eminence to which he was to be lifted.
A year ago the rebellion of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry had dramatically revealed the irreconcilable temperaments of North and South. While Virginia enthusiastically hanged the man who tried to create an armed negro revolution, the North tolled her bells, lowered her flags to half-mast and glorified him as a holy martyr.
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A month before the first vote for President was cast, Governor Gist, of South Carolina, addressed a secret circular to the other slave State governors saying, that if Lincoln were elected, which seemed almost certain, South Carolina would secede from the Union. The whole South was urged to join in this dismemberment of the republic.
The answers of the governors, even before the election had occurred, showed that it was not the intention of the slave States to submit to the rule of the majority, and that, already, armed resistance to the national authority was acceptable as the alternative to “the yoke of a black Republican President.”