Southerners, in their fear and fury, accused the Northern Democrats of betraying them by failing
to present slavery to the North as a positive good. On behalf of the North, George E. Pugh of
Ohio replied: Gentlemen of the South, you mistake us-you mistake us-we will not do it.' When the South failed to get the platform it wanted, the delegations from the Gulf states, South Carolina and Georgia, walked out, splitting the Democratic Party right down the middle. The convention met again at Baltimore on June 18 and finally nominated Douglas on a moderate platform. The Southerners replied by nominating the Vice-President, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (1821-75), on a slavery platform. The Whigs reorganized themselves as the constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell (1797-1869) of Tennessee as, in effect, the candidate of the border states. That meant four candidates. Essentially, however, it was a contest between Lincoln and Douglas in the North and Breckinridge and Bell in the South, since Lincoln could not hope to win Southern votes and Breckinridge had no support north of the Mason- Dixon Line. In effect, a Lincoln victory was certain provided no untoward events intervened and provided he made no spectacular blunder. Hence all his friends and advisors warned him to keep out of the campaign and let the Republican Party do the work. So Lincoln worked behind the scenes to keep the Republican Party together, and left it to the Democrats, or rather the South, to commit political suicide. His only public appearance in the campaign was at Springfield in August where, pressed to orate, he simply said:It has been my purpose, since I have been placed in my
present position, to make no speeches.' This gave him an almost Washingtonian detachment and
saved him from misrepresentation. On November 6 Lincoln waited in the telegraph office until
his victory in New York, signaled at 2 A.M. on the morning of the 7th, made his election certain.
He got 1,866,452 votes against Douglas' 1,376,957; there had been 849,781 for Breckinridge and
588,879 for Bell. The result, in terms of electoral college votes, was somewhat different: Lincoln
got 180, for he carried all but one of the free states, dividing New Jersey with Douglas (all the
latter got, apart from Missouri). Breckinridge won all the slave states except Virginia, Tennessee,
and Kentucky in the Upper South, which went to Bell. In ten of the Southern states Lincoln did
not receive a single vote. Moreover, he was elected on a minority vote of 39.9 percent, the lowest
since J. Q. Adams won the unlucky, ominous election of 1824. The nation was indeed divided.
If we now turn to Lincoln's principal opponent in the duel for the soul of America, we will see
why it was that the South, having held so many cards in its hand, allowed itself to be exasperated
into throwing away the game in a fit of temper. Jefferson Davis, Calhoun's political heir insofar
as he had one, was president of the Confederacy from its reckless birth to its pitiful death-agony.
He was flawed and blinkered both as man and as statesman, with huge weaknesses of judgment
and capacity. But he was not small in any sense of the word. Six feet tall, slim, ramrod-straight,
soldierly bearing, a fine head and intellectual face ... a look of culture and refinement about him,' hecould infuse courage into the bosom of a coward, and self-respect and pride into the
breasts of the most abandoned.' To his cause he brought a passion concentrated into a white heat, that threw out no sparks, no fitful flashes, glowing [instead] with an intense but not an angry glare.' These judgments by contemporaries were endorsed even by critics and enemies. Thomas Cobb of Georgia said,He is not great ... [but] the power of will he has, made him all he
is.'
The conventional portrait of Davis, the man driven by willpower, is of an old-fashioned
Southern gentleman. That is inexact. His middle name was Finis because he was born when his
mother was forty-seven, the last of ten. He had a modern-style upbringing: his father rejected any