A History of the American People

claims but Lincoln had a big success in New York. At the Republican State convention in
Decatur, Lincoln's cousin John Hanks did a remarkable if unconscious public relations job by
holding a demonstration centered around two fence-rails which, he said, were among the 3,000
Lincoln had split thirty years before. He told stories of Lincoln's youth and his pioneering father-
entirely fanciful in the latter's case-and made rail-splitting into a national symbol, from which
Lincoln hugely benefited. Lincoln was in Springfield when a telegram arrived saying he had
been nominated for president at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. He said: I reckon there is a little short woman down in our house that would like to hear the news.' He took his acceptance speech to the local school superintendent, who corrected a split infinitive. The Democratic papers dismissed Lincoln asa third-rate lawyer,' a nullity,'a man in the
habit of making coarse and clumsy jokes,' one who could not speak good grammar,' agorilla.'
And we have to remember that most of Lincoln's sayings and speeches, and even his letters, have
been cleaned up a good deal before coming down to us. The feeling that he was too rough to be
president was not confined to the South, or even to Democrats. But William Cullen Bryant
(1794-1878), the anti-slavery poet and philosopher, who had helped to found the Republican
Party, called him A poor flatboatman-such are the true leaders of the nation.' Lincoln had the Douglas Debates made into a little pamphlet, which he gave to people who asked his views. It served his purpose well. In dealing with the South's threat that his election would lead them to secede, he had already taken the bull by the horns in his speech at the Cooper Institution in New York City, February 27, 1860:You will not abide by the election of a Republican President! In
that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of
having destroyed the Union will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my
ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver!-or I shall kill you, and then you will be a
murderer!" '
Using the political arithmetic of the previous thirty years, Lincoln should have been defeated.
All the South had to do was to retain its links with the North, concentrate on keeping Jackson's
old Democratic coalition together, and pick another Buchanan, or similar. But that was
increasingly difficult to do, as the anti-slavers of the North raised the political temperature and
the South replied with paranoia. Militant abolitionism dated from the early 1830s, when it
became obvious that repatriating blacks to West Africa had failed-only 1,420 blacks had been
settled in Liberia by 1831 and the number going there was declining. On January 11, 1831
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) began publishing the Liberator in Boston. It carried its motto
on the front page: I am in earnest-I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch-and I will be heard.' Garrison said he relied wholly on moral persuasion and condemned force, but some of his fiercest attacks were launched on moderate abolitionists and he began a new round of militancy on the Fourth of July 11854 when he burned a copy of the Constitution with the words,So perish all compromises with tyranny.' Meanwhile the American
Anti-Slavery Society (1833) had been organized by two New York merchants, Arthur and Lewis
Tappan, in conjunction with the most sophisticated and effective of the abolitionist campaigners,
Theodore D. Weld (1803-95), whose anonymous tract, American Slavery As It Is (1839)
furnished the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin. Weld organized Oberlin as the first college to
admit both blacks and women, and he married Angela Grimke, one of two South Carolina sisters
who freed their slaves and moved north to campaign.
Initially there was a lot of opposition to the anti-slavery movement in the North, where most
Northerners hated blacks and frequently subjected them to mass violence. But by the end of the
1830s a younger generation who took the morality of abolition for granted began to take up