XPost: soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   On Thu, 27 Jan 2022 07:46:46 -0800 (PST), Jeffrey Rubard   
    wrote:   
      
      
   Long before Covid-19, Alexis de Tocqueville described a presidential   
   election as a form of sickness in which the body politic became   
   dangerously “feverish” 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 heart” —   
   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 man”) 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 dye”) to his weakness (“the   
   plaything of his party”). Republicans were accused of “socialism,”   
   already a loaded term, and it was whispered that they would   
   “redistribute” wealth, property and even wives, since “Free Love”   
   would presumably follow “Free Soil” 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, “hundreds of thousands” of slaves would invade the   
   North, to consummate “African amalgamation with the fair daughters of   
   the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Teutonic races.”   
      
   Long before QAnon, lurid tales were spun on Southern plantations,   
   where slaves were told that Lincoln was a cannibal, “with tails and   
   horns,” who would “devour every one of the African race.” 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.”   
      
   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 “sectional”   
   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.”   
   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 “if Lincoln is   
   elected we will go to Washington and assassinate him before his   
   inauguration.” An Atlanta newspaper promised that it would pave   
   Pennsylvania Avenue “ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies” 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.”   
      
   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,” 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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)