On the Southern heart this Quixotic invasion by a mistaken, personally injured father, maddened by the losses of his sons, and unjustifiably wreaking his individual injuries on a community innocent of any wrong to him, laid a live, inflaming coal.
In April, 1860, the Democratic Convention met at Charleston. Some gentlemen asked that body to declare its belief that the Union, having been got up principally to hold Africans in an unpaid condition, any uncolored owner could, by virtue of the laws of his own State, take these bronze-colored bipeds,—always diffusing a bad odor unless to their proprietors,—to any Territory. Not holding such a notion, the Convention declined to make the declaration, but, on the contrary, asserted that each Territory was competent to deal with the matter as it saw fit. The question, thus resolved, was not of course to the minority satisfactorily solved.
Following a convenient practice, deemed by some persons, unschooled in such things, a little uncommon among gentlemen, of getting, if possible, a decision favorable to their views which shall bind the minority, and if unsuccessful repudiating the adverse decision as affecting them, the delegates of six bronze-statued States left the unreasonable party, carrying a banner with a dimly seen inscription, “Heads I win, tails you lose, or, tails I win, heads you lose.” The convention, thus treated to Breckinridge principles, adjourned to meet in June at Baltimore.
Meanwhile, in May, the missionary party, reinforced by numerous converts, assembled and chose the Anak of Illinois as their leader. In June the widowed Democratic Convention reassembled; but only to split up into two family divisions, the one nominating the dike-breaker, the other John C. Breckenridge, then Vice-President, and destined in a few years to take, not the Presidency, but the very first prize for a character which total depravity is occasionally permitted to offer, lest fiction may invent a combination that shall outstrip reality.
Of course the Drummond lights now burned brighter. Tar and oratory illumined corner groceries and open-air meetings. Small men, set to the large honor of presiding over these gatherings, which in an hour or two settled “the most stupendous questions that freemen were ever called to meet,” became apoplectic, and were only saved to their country by an application at the nearest bar-room of a remedy reduced to a prescription in which
| Aqua-vitæ | 92 | parts, |
| Aqua-pura | ½ | part, |
| Saccharum | 7½ | parts, |
| restored them to par, or | 100 | proof. |
When in November, 1860, the lights were put out, it appeared that Mr. Lincoln had received 180, Mr. Breckenridge 72, Mr. Bell 39, and the Douglas 12 electoral votes. There were 130,773 more ballots cast even at the South against Mr. Breckenridge than in his favor. His opinion of the Union, for which he had run out of breath to be President, was now, of course, very unfavorable; but as it was balanced by its kindred opinion of him, he was under no obligation to confirm its judgment by taking the first prize soon after offered to him.
South Carolina, which had often been outvoted before, only waited this time four days—not stopping long enough to see if she was hurt, or how the heads-and-tails flag would look—before calling a convention which more Cariolense substantially resolved that the Union had broken the Union, and that the people who voted differently from South Carolina were unconstitutional, and ergo, that she might have her own Constitution and by-laws. She had helped to rule the roast so long that she could not think of taking turns now.
Congress met in December, 1860. Of course John C. Breckenridge was on hand. To him the Union was a good thing so long as he could preside over its representatives. While caucusing nights against it, he could sit in daylight to administer oaths—and even to take them—to support it.
The message was full of unginned cotton-seeds vigorously sprouting. It charged the attempted burglary of the Union safe, not on the burglars, but upon its owners. It chided the people for having done wrong in electing an Anak so absurd as not to agree with South Carolina on the little dark-skinned question; proposed several Africanizing amendments to the Federal Constitution, and then floundered into the author’s chronic chaos; seeming at one moment to believe that a State could not secede, then again that it rather could; then, that if it did, it ought not to; but then if it ought not to, who could prevent it if it did; and if it did not, why the fire-flies did not hold out their little lanterns long enough to light him, or in fact any one else that he knew of, across the miry place.