From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   Long before Covid-19, Alexis de Tocqueville described a presidential election   
   as a form of sickness in which the body politic became dangerously   
   â€œfeverishâ€� before returning to normal. Emotions ran too hot, and the   
   fragile forms of consensus that were    
   essential for democracy — what Tocqueville called our “habits of the   
   heartâ€� — evaporated, as party hacks exhausted themselves in vitriolic   
   attacks on one another and the system.   
      
   That was true in 1860, as the most toxic campaign in American history   
   delivered Abraham Lincoln — by most accounts, our greatest president. But   
   before he could save the Union, Lincoln had to survive his election and a   
   difficult transition, bitterly    
   resisted by an entrenched political establishment that had no intention of   
   giving up power.   
      
   Throughout Lincoln’s rise in 1860, the South watched in horror as this   
   unlikely candidate grew in stature. He gave no serious speeches after his   
   nomination, but he did not need to, as the Buchanan administration began to   
   collapse under the weight of    
   its incompetence and greed. It was not simply that a rising number of   
   Americans were tired of propping up slavery, as the Democratic Party had been   
   doing for decades. Throughout the year, they were shocked by revelations that   
   Southern cabinet members had    
   embezzled huge sums (the secretary of war, John Floyd, was nicknamed “the   
   $6,000,000 manâ€�) and sent guns from Northern armories into the South, arming   
   themselves for a war that did not yet have a name.   
      
   Lincoln rejected that pay-to-play culture. He lived abstemiously and spoke   
   modestly, rarely using the first person. He opposed the expansion of slavery   
   and disapproved of plans to seize Cuba and Northern Mexico to groom   
   pro-Southern states. He was    
   sympathetic to immigrants and to the idea that America should stand for a set   
   of principles, as a kind of beacon in an amoral world. He admired the   
   Declaration of Independence, with its promise of equal rights for all.   
      
   For all of these reasons, Lincoln posed a lethal threat to the status quo.   
   Since 1800, the capital of the United States had been located in a very   
   Southern place, well below the Mason-Dixon line. The three-fifths clause of   
   the Constitution    
   overrepresented the South, but there was more to it than that. Southerners   
   were especially good at dominating the federal government, despite their   
   rhetoric about states’ rights. In the first 61 years of the government, the   
   South held the presidency    
   for 50 years, the speakership for 41 years, and the chairmanship of the House   
   Ways and Means Committee for 52 years. Eighteen of 31 Supreme Court justices   
   had been Southerners, even though four-fifths of the court’s business came   
   from the North.    
   Washington was not simply a capital; this was a citadel for slavery.   
      
   That all would change if Lincoln were elected, as Southern leaders understood.   
   Accordingly, they devoted their considerable resources to gaming the system,   
   through a campaign of false personal attacks, physical intimidation and ballot   
   manipulation.    
   Political insults were not new, but the fury unleashed against Lincoln raised   
   the invective to a new level, as Southern newspapers (and many Northern ones)   
   attacked the Republican candidate for everything from his tyrannical impulses   
   (an “abolitionist    
   of the reddest dyeâ€�) to his weakness (“the plaything of his partyâ€�).   
   Republicans were accused of “socialism,â€� already a loaded term, and it was   
   whispered that they would “redistributeâ€� wealth, property and even wives,   
   since “Free Loveâ€�    
   would presumably follow “Free Soilâ€� if they were allowed to take the White   
   House.   
      
   Racial innuendo was a constant in these ugly attacks. Readers were   
   breathlessly informed that Lincoln and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, were   
   secretly mulatto, and The New York Herald promised that if Lincoln won,   
   â€œhundreds of thousandsâ€� of    
   slaves would invade the North, to consummate “African amalgamation with the   
   fair daughters of the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Teutonic races.â€�   
      
   Long before QAnon, lurid tales were spun on Southern plantations, where slaves   
   were told that Lincoln was a cannibal, “with tails and horns,â€� who would   
   â€œdevour every one of the African race.â€� That ruse failed; Booker T.   
   Washington was only 4    
   years old then, but he later recalled that “the slaves on our far-off   
   plantation, miles from any railroad or large city or daily newspapers, knew   
   what the issues involved were.â€�   
      
   As the campaign wore on, the South realized that other means of persuasion   
   were required. In Baltimore and Washington, mobs broke up Republican offices,   
   shot off guns and desecrated images of Lincoln. His name was not even   
   permitted on the ballot in 10    
   Southern states — a fact that was held against him, as if he were a   
   â€œsectionalâ€� candidate. In border states, as well, voters were intimidated:   
   In the state of his birth, Kentucky, Lincoln received only 1,364 votes.   
      
   Still, America was getting to know this political newcomer. After receiving 52   
   applications to write his campaign biography, Lincoln joked that he was   
   worried about all of these “attempts on my life.â€� But violence was no   
   laughing matter, and Lincoln†  
   ™s life was in danger from the moment he was nominated. A Virginia   
   congressman, Roger Pryor, was quoted in The New York Herald as saying that   
   â€œif Lincoln is elected we will go to Washington and assassinate him before   
   his inauguration.â€� An Atlanta    
   newspaper promised that it would pave Pennsylvania Avenue “ten fathoms deep   
   with mangled bodiesâ€� rather than submit to Lincoln’s presidency. A visitor   
   to Lincoln’s home commented that “letters threatening his life are daily   
   received from the    
   South.â€�   
      
   Tocqueville would have been the first to argue that violence, whether implied   
   or real, was fatal to the social trust necessary for democracy. But   
   Southerners grew unhinged as they contemplated the end of their easy access to   
   power. In Charlottesville, Va.   
   , one newspaper tried to blame Lincoln voters for “numerical tyranny,â€� as   
   if Northerners were corrupting democracy simply by existing in such large   
   numbers. Many were beginning to understand that the South’s ideas about   
   democracy were as peculiar    
   as its institutions. South Carolina still did not allow its citizens to vote   
   for president, and in 1864 Jefferson Davis confirmed in an interview in this   
   newspaper, “We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority.â€�   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)