Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis

Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. By David M. Potter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942.

David M. Potter was a professor of American history at Yale, and Secession Crisis was his first major work following his graduation with a PhD in 1940. As the title suggests, Potter deals with the Republican party's role during the secession crisis, and discusses many of the theories surrounding the party's role in the weeks and months leading up to the secession of the southern states. Many historians have written on the same topic, but Potter seeks to contest some of the more popular misconceptions surrounding the motives of the Republican party and point out their true objectives.

Potter begins, however, by cautioning the reader that, since history is often studied with the end results in mind, that it is difficult to grasp the idea that the actors in history acted as they did without knowing the end result. Whether Republican, Democrat, or apolitical, Americans had no idea of what the future had in store for them in 1860, nor could they possibly have known the consequences of their actions. That America was marching inexorably towards a prolonged and bloody civil war was far from certain leading up to or following the nineteenth quadrennial presidential election. Although the events leading up to the beginning of the American Civil War now appear to the modern eye to have been almost guided toward conflict, this was not the case. Events unfolded as they did as the various parties pursued reconciliation or secession respectively.

Among the first of the misinterpretations Potter addresses is the assumption that the Republican party secretly wished to use war as a means of abolishing slavery. The suggestion that the Republican party guided the nation toward war knowing that, inevitably, slavery would be abolished as a result, is tantamount to accusing Lincoln, Seward, and others of conspiring to commit mass genocide for the sake of freeing the enslaved peoples in the southern states. This tendency towards abolition was certainly not true of the party, as will be shortly demonstrated, although abolition may have been the ultimate objective for some within the party, Potter argues persuasively that the Republican leaders were not pursuing war as a means to end the practice of slavery.

This supposed Republican abolitionist ideal is the next issue discussed by Potter. The Republican party was less than a decade old in 1860, and was sending only its second presidential nominee into the fray. Rather than having a firm platform dedicated to the abolition of slavery, the Republican party was truly a mishmash of former Whigs, disenfranchised Democrats, abolitionists, and others. The conservative contingent of the party represented at least half of the party's ranks, and would not have tolerated a civil war if it were fought in the name of emancipation. Nor could the abolitionist faction of the Republican party have counted on the election of Lincoln and other Republicans to federal offices as public sanction of their policies. Lincoln received not quite forty percent of the vote in 1860--hardly a public sanction of Republican policies. Many of the people who voted in Republicans may well have been voting for Republican tariffs, or merely to combat southern extremism. Whatever the modern perception, it is abundantly clear that not all Republicans were abolitionists, radical or otherwise.

While the Republican party may not have been guilty of conspiracy to lead the nation into war nor abolish slavery by any means necessary, Potter does point out that the party was culpable of underestimating the southern secession threat. Granted, the Southern states had threatened secession before, and backed down when their bluff had been called. One New York newspaper, according to Potter, predicted that the secession threat would pass like a cloud following a summer drizzle. There were additional signs that the Southern states were serious this time, however, including the unwillingness of those Southern congressmen whose home states had opened special sessions of their legislatures to discuss terminating their relationship with the union to open themselves to any concession talks within Congress. Republicans continued to discount threats of secession until Southern states had, indeed, seceded. Even then, Republicans hoped that the seceded states would return to the union following further negotiations.

This conceived process, referred to as "reunion," or "voluntary reconstruction" by Potter, would essentially entail the reunification of the United and seceded states in a peaceable manner consented to by both parties. The process of reunion would follow much the same lines as the concessions already attempted by the Crittenden Compromise and other measures intended to prevent secession. The laws, and perhaps Constitution, would have needed to be amended in order for the separated states to accede to reunion. Above all, Republicans would have to move very precisely and delicately in order to prevent any armed conflicts, or peaceful reunion would be impossible. The peaceful maintenance or annexation of federal posts and forts in Southern states would be critical to prevent the powder keg from going up in flames. This critical mission met with failure when Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina and forced the small garrison to surrender. The violence polarized Americans on both sides of the issue, rendering bloodless reunion impossible.

Ultimately, Potter concludes that the Republican party, and Lincoln in particular, were consistent in their handling of the "lame duck" period between the election of 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War, if they did not handle each situation perfectly. Lincoln and the Republicans could have done more in order to prevent secession, and Potter argues that they should have done more to avoid disunion. Doubtless the eleventh-hour wrangling which took place in the months covered by Potter's book would have made a permanent resolution difficult, Potter maintains that the Republican plan was a good one, but that it overestimated the desire of some of the Southern states to remain in the union, and was thus fundamentally flawed. Although Republican policy may have overestimated Southern will to remain in the union, this union-centric mentality would prove important years later when preparing to welcome the Southern states back into the fold.

Stephen Edwards

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Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. By David M. Potter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942.

The eminent historian David Potter, most famous for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Impending Crisis, published Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis in 1942, two years after completing his Yale doctorate under U. B. Philips. In this in-depth political history, Potter rejects the notion that Lincoln and the young Republican Party deliberately drove the Republic to Civil War. Instead, he concludes Lincoln and his fellow party leaders underestimated secessionist fervor and overestimated Southern Unionism yet in the context of what they knew at the time pursued a tactically sound policy during the prelude to the firing on Fort Sumter.

Throughout the work Potter takes to task the habit of reading history backwards, assuming historical actors knew what we know now with the benefit of hindsight. His opening chapter, “The Shopworn Threat of Secession,” makes this point abundantly clear, establishing how by 1860 Southern threats to secede had become a standard fixture of antebellum political rhetoric and lulled Republicans into assuming such threats were hollow. Potter uses public speeches, party newspapers, and private correspondence to establish that few Republican leaders thought the secession crisis would inexorably lead to civil war. He also chronicles the hidden schism within the Republican Party between true believers committed to resisting the spread of slavery and eleventh hour joiners from the fractured Whig and Democrat Parties inclined toward moderation. Both Republican wings had supported Abraham Lincoln as their presidential candidate because each envisioned him as one of their own. During James Buchanan’s lame duck period Lincoln famously remained publicly silent on the ongoing secession crisis, a move Potter justifies given the Illinois politician’s lack of national gravitas and clout. While Potter considers the 1860-61 Lincoln far from infallible, he credits Lincoln with holding his party together during the crisis behind the scenes and successfully turning it away from seeking conciliation or peaceful dissolution.

With Lincoln publicly silent, Sen. William Seward of New York served the party as de facto spokesman. Potter further critiques the assumption that Lincoln and Seward deliberately maneuvered the Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter in order to start the war on favorable terms. Instead, he notes how they in fact secretly offered to evacuate Sumter in return for Virginia dismissing its secession convention, in hopes of keeping Virginia (the largest slave state) advantageously in the Union. Potter recounts another historically obscure episode in which the Lincoln administration offered the assistance of federal troops to Gov. Sam Houston in order to keep Texas in the Union, an offer Houston somewhat reluctantly turned down.

Potter is at his best in reconstructing the complex political history of the secession crisis and in contextualizing what Republican leaders knew or thought they knew at the time. Ironically, at the same time he offers tentative praise for the Crittenden Compromise (rejected by Lincoln). He further emphasizes that secessionists faced uphill battles in all states but South Carolina and were opposed by substantial Unionist forces, forces which Potter suggests would have been further strengthened by conciliatory efforts. Potter’s scholarship was apparently influenced by the “repressible conflict” school which held that fringe elements ignited the Civil War rather than widespread sectional animosity, so it is unclear whether he underestimated popular Southern support for secession. Paradoxically, Potter subtly criticizes Republicans’ reading of the strategic situation but presents their policy as consistent and tactically sound based on their assumptions: “In the light of all the circumstances, it appears that the war which followed the bombardment of Sumter was, perhaps, the result of Republican misconceptions, but was certainly not the result of a deliberate war policy” (374). Potter compliments Seward and Lincoln (particularly the former) for successfully defending federal authority while doing so more subtly than Andrew Jackson had done in 1832, and for skillfully maneuvering the Border States away from secession, even if such efforts did not forestall civil war.

Jonathan Steplyk

Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. By David Potter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942.

In explaining the run-up to Fort Sumter’s bombardment, David Potter feels the need to defend Lincoln from historians who blame the President’s mishandling of the secession crisis for leading the country towards a potentially avoidable war. Potter’s Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis tries to justify Lincoln’s actions as consistent and logical, if misguided. Lincoln’s interpretation of the secession crisis and divisions within the Republican Party informed Lincoln’s actions. These actions, based on faulty assumptions, eventually led to the war, but challenge accusations Lincoln’s malice. Potter’s explanation of the president’s actions provides a window into the course and outcome of the long and tense secession crisis.

Potter’s first key point involves the relative lack of surprise surrounding Southern secession. Slave-holding states threatened the nation with secession many times over the preceding thirty years, with increasing intensity through the 1850s. Usually, these threats surrounded presidential elections, especially with the rise of the abolition movement and a stronger anti-slavery party in the North. When the announcement of Lincoln’s election came, South Carolina responded with its ordinance of secession. For many Northerners, it was not so far-fetched to believe that secession was a bluff, meant to pressure the new administration into stating greater support for slavery’s protection. The expectation that the seceded states were merely bluffing fed long-standing beliefs that the driving forces behind secession represented a minority population. Lincoln and his party would consistently misjudge the depth and breadth of pro-secession sentiment in the South and based their proposed plans for reunion upon this misconception.

One aspect holding back the South from fully exploiting its secession threat was political division amongst slaveholding states. While South Carolina and the states of the Deep South showed their willingness to leave by doing so fairly quickly, the Upper South and Border States hesitated, or even rejected the idea of secession. Seward and other Republicans recognized this division and attempted to exacerbate it, isolating the seceded states and forcing reconciliation by allowing the over-estimated Unionist sentiment to re-establish political control. Seward in particular maintained close communication with political leaders from the Upper South, hoping to keep a close relationship.

Much like the South, Lincoln’s party suffered from internal divisions. While the Republicans supported union, not all were willing to challenge the South on secession. Even if Lincoln were fully prepared to pressure the South for reunion, he could not count on support from his party’s moderates. The Republican’s minority vote total and heavily regional victory deprived them of the usual mandate that follows from a presidential election. Many, in particular the moderates, were unwilling to press too far without a clearly national support base. The long period between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration exacerbated this division. Following tradition, the newly-elected president did not directly address the situation, avoiding a trap for the outgoing Buchanan administration. This silence left control of the Republican Party to Seward, its most visible leader. Leaked news of Seward’s eventual nomination for Secretary of State further enhanced his stature. This announcement imbued a greater significance to Seward’s public statements, as they now represented the positions of the incoming President.

These weaknesses in Republican understanding of the situation colored their attempts at reconciliation. The proposed Crittenden Compromise came first, but Lincoln and Seward rejected it, feeling that the Compromise’s amendments were too conciliatory. If Southern threats of secession were as weak as the Republicans believed, Crittenden’s plan offered a short-term solution that could only serve to further embolden the South in the future. Instead, Lincoln and Seward tried to call for reconciliation on the grounds that the Union represented a mutually beneficial arrangement for all parties as it stood, that he would continue to press for halting the spread of slavery in the territories, and that the federal government would stand by its position of holding federal territory, including forts. If secession sentiment truly were as weak as Lincoln believed, this might have been enough. His misjudgment of Southern seriousness made this offer unsustainably militant, which the attempted resupply of Fort Sumter tragically proved.

Potter takes greatest exception to the idea that Lincoln drove the nation to war knowing that his positions could not lead to reconciliation. Historians promoting this idea, he argues, fall prey to the fallacy of judging history by its outcomes. Since the war actually began, they incorrectly argue Lincoln should have known the outcome of his actions would be the outbreak of war. Potter uses letters not only from Lincoln and Seward, but also other Republicans, to show the basis for their thought processes. Their firm, if misguided, belief that secession was bluff, combined with internal Republican division, colored their proposals for reconciliation and reunion. Potter’s narrative of those critical four months exposes the political divisions both North and South that helped push the nation toward war.

David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), vii-375.

Throughout Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, renowned historian David M. Potter warns historians against the dangers of relying too much on hindsight, when attempting to understand the past. Potter claims that many historians look retrospectively at events in time. Knowing the outcomes, academics search for the clues that led to these results. In presenting the secession crisis, Potter illustrates this period as a moment in time, in which anything could have happened. He successfully shows that the Republican Party did not know that the South was serious when this region threatened to depart from the Union. After realizing the gravity of the matter, Republicans looked for ways to keep the nation intact. Although some Republicans called for compromises with the South, Lincoln refused to make allowances that would counter the beliefs of the Republican Party. Although many historians claim that the Civil War was unavoidable, Potter counters these beliefs by demonstrating that many Republicans believed that the secession crisis would end peacefully, with the South voluntarily returning to reunite the Union (Potter vii-375).

Although historians typically focus on the severity of the South’s calls for secession, Potter notes that Republicans, at that time, had no way of knowing that the South’s uses of intimidation were indeed real. Instead, Potter shows that the South threatened secession at other times. Because Southerners never followed through with their warnings, the North began to view this region’s promises as empty bluffs. Looking back at this time period, Potter relies on the words of politicians and columnists to reveal the lack of forethought on the part of the Republicans (1-187). In one of William H. Seward’s speeches, he posits, ‘the slave power …rails now with a feeble voice, instead of thundering as it did for twenty or thirty years past. With a feeble and muttering voice they cry out that they will tear the Union to pieces…. Who’s afraid? Nobody’s afraid. Nobody can be bought’ (Potter 11, from the Speech at St. Paul, Sep. 18,1860). Once the Gulf states began to secede, a few months after Lincoln’s election, Seward later contended that he and his party were indeed unaware of the magnitude of the situation (78).

Potter notes that historians have presented the 1860s Republican Party as a united front. Potter instead reveals that fissures threatened this nascent party, just as it gained political prominence. Many concepts were considered on how to deal with Southern secession, but a number of Northerners disagreed on how to effectively resolve this matter. Some Northerners supported the Crittenden Compromise. Its author Senator John Crittenden sought to reinstate the Missouri Compromise and its Mason-Dixon Line. Extending past the former Louisiana Purchase territory, this line would now also divide the West into slave and free areas. Crittenden also sought an amendment that would constitutionally protect slavery, in the states where this institution existed (105-110). President-elect Abraham Lincoln disagreed with Crittenden. Lincoln believed that this compromise with the South would undo the efforts of the Republican Party. Lincoln expressed early on that he must allow slave states to keep their bondsmen, due to a constitutional protection, but he sought to ban slavery in the territories. He believed that the exclusion of slavery in the territories was the will of the Framers of the Constitution. Lincoln successfully worked to rally his party to adhere to his beliefs (20-187)

Even though the South seceded from the Union, Northerners hoped that this region would eventually return. Instead of waging war to regain this area, Northerners believed that Southerners would come back on their own. Believing that Unionist feelings existed in the hearts and minds of a large number of Southerners, Lincoln and his party watched and waited for the possible signs of a Southern homecoming. The Republican Party believed that if the Border states (“loyal” slave states) remained in the Union; then the seceded states would feel “their inadequacy” and also believe that “they were left in a conspicuous minority” (281). Potter effectively demonstrates that Lincoln and the North believed that bloodshed would be avoided, and the nation would be reunited. After the clash at Fort Sumter, Northerners began to realize that their optimistic outlooks was indeed doomed (280-372).

Although Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis was written before Potter’s seminal works, People of Plenty, (1954) and his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Impending Crisis (1977), Potter still does a masterful job by going back in time to understand how 19^th century Republicans viewed the secession crisis.

Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. By David M. Potter. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942. Pp. x, 345.)

David M. Potter’s 1942 study, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, examines the events of winter, 1860-1861 that led to the secession of the South and precipitated the Civil War. Focusing on the Republican Party as a whole, their changing approaches to the increasingly hostile South, and the attitudes and actions of the president-elect, Potter contributes to Civil War historiography by probing a topic that had heretofore elicited little attention from scholars.

Potter first explores the “shopworn threat of secession,” demonstrating that the Republicans of 1860 saw secession as a rhetorical weapon to frighten an already charged electorate, one that had been threatened for decades before (p. 1). This fundamental misunderstanding of the intentions of the seceding states destroyed the Republican Party’s ability to act accordingly to avert violent conflict, as they misinterpreted Southern actions as shallow and contrived, when in fact, reality was quite the opposite. Additionally, division within the Republican Party itself further muddied the waters, as did president-elect Lincoln’s deliberate taciturnity. By responding to Southern threats with incredulity and in some cases ridicule, the Republicans failed to respond with a real attempt to understand the problem or even an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the South’s concerns, further exacerbating the conflict.

Additionally, the Republicans of 1861 were at a disadvantage—their lack of experience as a major party compounded by the virtual absence of a strong leader put them in a position of weakness in their own eyes as well as those of the American public. Lacking a mandate from the people, Lincoln’s party did not have the moral imperative to act decisively, thus opening them to attack from various minority groups. Potter notes that it is impressive that the Republican ranks held as well as they did, given the circumstances. In the Senate, the continued debate of the Crittenden Compromise, which would have allowed slavery in the territories below the 36˚ 30’ line and stripped Congress of the right to control slavery from therein, demonstrates the weakening of Republican resolve to maintain the status quo. Although the plan was never accepted, the fact that it was hotly debated and widely accepted by much of the American public is demonstrative of the increasing severity of the conflict.

Potter’s views on Abraham Lincoln stray far from the hagiography that many historians fall victim to in their considerations of the acts and deeds of the sixteenth President of the United States. While he does concede that Lincoln held his party together during this time of extreme crisis, and that he held firm to his morally upright views, Potter makes it a key point that during the winter of 1860-1861, Lincoln exhibited a continued failure to appreciate the militant attitudes held by those of the secession movement. As evidenced in the words of his First Inaugural Address, he expected the Union to be upheld without war, and hoped for peaceable reconciliation between the two sections of the country: “But no war,—no force can ever restore the Union. That work must be done by other means” (p. 330).

Potter does an excellent job of relating the utter importance of the Border States to the crisis. Both Lincoln and his Secretary of State William H. Seward understood the absolute advantage of retaining the Border States in the Union, whether war or peace emerged from the crisis. By retaining the Border States, Seward hoped demonstrate to the Gulf States their sheer numerical and thus economic inferiority. He was also aware that should reconciliation occur the Border States would be the intermediary between the North and South; their ability to woo the insurrectionist South back into the Union was thus invaluable.

A valuable study of events and information pertinent to understanding the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis merits the publication of a revised, updated version for modern readers, who at times may find Potter’s antiquated writing style dense and unappealing. To his credit, Potter’s argument is logical and detailed, and his research is broad and well interpreted. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis is a valuable and informative work appropriate for students and scholars interested in the coming of the Civil War.