Authors: Adam Goodheart
It is hard to imagine today how some lengths of old lumber could electrify a large tentful of jaded politicos—let alone much of the nation. But the split-rail fence, sometimes known as a “worm fence,” was a powerful symbol in the nineteenth century, and a brilliant choice as an emblem for the Lincoln campaign, perhaps the most ingenious ever devised in more than two hundred years of presidential politics. For one thing, it was a distinctively
American construction. (Visiting Europeans often mentioned such fences in their letters home, as an instance of local color.) For another, it was almost ubiquitous in Lincoln’s time. Just after the Civil War, a government survey found
that 86 percent of
Ohio’s fences were made of split rails; 75 percent of
Maine’s; 92 percent of Oregon’s.
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Split-rail fences required hard work to build. They represented individual independence and private ownership, and yet also a sense of community, since they were often constructed by groups of neighbors coming together to pitch in. They epitomized America’s working class and its rural way of life. They were homely, yet strong—perhaps like Lincoln himself.
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Perhaps most important, though, the split-rail fence was a symbol of the
West (mainly what today we would call the
Midwest), since it was often the first permanent structure that a pioneer would build after clearing the land. In 1860, regions that not long before had been remote frontier territories peopled mostly by
Indians—places like
Iowa,
Minnesota, and Oregon—had suddenly become settled states with significant voting blocs. These were places where people still lived much as Ralph Farnham had in Maine at the end of the previous century, lives of hard work and fierce independence, secured with an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other. But the image, and the romance of the West, resonated back East, too: dime
novels and illustrated monthlies had brought the frontier to every street-corner newsstand.
Cringing under the barrage of fence rails, Lincoln’s rivals for the presidency tried to fire back in some fashion. Supporters of
John Bell, who bore the standard of the
Constitutional
Union Party, carried little tinkling bells to their rallies and formed clubs called the Bell Ringers or the Clapperites. Douglas’s followers organized themselves as the
Little Dougs. But all emblems are not created equal, and these enticements did not noticeably boost either man’s candidacy.
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Still, Lincoln’s opponents seemed to have history on their side. The country may have been increasingly fractured along sectional lines, but in the spring and summer of 1860, two concerns united many Americans in both North and South: the fear of
disunion and the desire for peace. For forty years, the precarious balance had been held through conciliation and compromise, with political bargains by which Southerners could feel
secure that their “peculiar institution” would be tolerated and even protected by the government of the United States, while Northerners were assured that their own soil would never know the moral taint of slavery. In most Americans’ minds as of 1860, the ideal of union and the ideal of universal freedom stood in direct antithesis, irreconcilable at present or anytime in the foreseeable future.
Events of the past decade had only proved the precariousness of the balance, and set blood boiling on both sides. Most white Southerners were furious over
John Brown’s attempted invasion of
Virginia the
previous year. They suspected it was part of a concerted Northern plot to realize the South’s worst nightmare: a widespread and bloody slave revolt like that in
Haiti seven decades before, when Negroes were alleged to have raped, tortured, and slaughtered whites by the thousands. Northern abolitionists, they believed, surreptitiously fanned the flames of “servile rebellion” by circulating abolitionist literature in the South, even slipping it into the hands of slaves whom they had perfidiously taught how to read. And they had robbed Southerners of property, constitutionally protected property,
when Northern thieves helped slaves escape through the
Underground Railroad. Northern propagandists who had barely set foot in the South fabricated outrageous slanders like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
defaming their Southern brethren to the entire world. Even the Supreme Court’s ruling in the
Dred Scott
case—which had declared eloquently and unequivocally that slave ownership was a basic
constitutional right and that blacks could never, at least in a legal sense, be considered fully human—had not been enough to check their outrages. Some of the Northern extremists now even idolized Brown, the insane fanatic who had put weapons into the Negroes’ hands and had himself once slaughtered five law-abiding
Kansas settlers with a broadsword simply for being proslavery. Finally, many in the South feared that the North’s
burgeoning population, increasing economic power, and growing strength in national politics would only multiply the audacious encroachments on Southern liberties.
Increasing numbers of Northern voters, meanwhile, were coming to suspect a Southern scheme to establish a vast slave empire stretching from the
Caribbean (where renegade Southern adventurers had recently tried to take
Cuba and
Nicaragua by force) to the Pacific coast. How else to understand their violations of the
Missouri Compromise
and attempts to expand slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, far north of the bounds Congress had set? Northerners had been forced to swallow the
Fugitive Slave Act, making local courts complicit in the kidnapping of Negroes living peacefully among their white neighbors. They had seen antislavery settlers massacred in Missouri and Kansas, and, throughout the South, anyone expressing even the mildest antislavery
sentiments had suffered imprisonment, flogging, tarring and feathering, and sometimes death. This violence had reached even the sacred halls of the Capitol when
Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, brutally beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor. Slaveholders and their allies burned books, banned
newspapers, and terrorized ministers of the gospel. They had, in fact,
made a mockery of the entire idea of American
democracy, turning the phrase “land of the free” into a sneer on European lips. And all this was over and above the crimes and outrages that Southerners perpetrated every day against four million helpless men, women, and children whom they kept in bondage, sold like cattle, and exploited for their sexual pleasure.
As with all politics, there was also a broad middle ground on which most white American males—which is also to say most voters—probably stood. Some Southerners, especially in states of the Upper South like
Kentucky,
Missouri,
Maryland, and
Virginia, saw slavery as an unfortunate arrangement and hoped it could gradually be
done away with, perhaps by sending freed blacks to
Liberia and compensating their owners, whose slaves often constituted most of their wealth. A larger share of Northerners, while wishing to limit the spread of slavery, felt it would be dangerous, as well as unfair to slaveholders, to impose a program of emancipation. They certainly did not identify themselves as abolitionists, a term reserved for members of a radical, crankish New England sect.
Indeed, the vast majority of white Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line accepted without question the premise that blacks were inherently inferior and that the two races could never live together as equals. Some white Northerners even agreed with the common Southern sentiment that slavery was good for the Negro.
Each of the three major parties in the 1860 presidential election sought to capture as much of this middle ground as possible, promising some form of compromise that would keep the peace. Wasn’t this, after all, the very essence of American democracy: balancing interests, reconciling contrary views, and protecting each community’s right to make its own laws and follow its own conscience? Few were those, either abolitionists or slaveholders, who
didn’t maintain that even an uncomfortable truce was preferable to the horrors of civil war.
Some Northern and Southern moderates had banded together in February to form a new national party based on the simplest version of this logic. The platform of the
Constitutional Union Party was little more than a slogan: “The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” It nominated Bell, a Tennessee slaveholder who believed the Constitution protected the right to own slaves but
opposed recent Southern expansionism, especially the effort to foist slavery upon
Kansas. Bell was a colorless, even dour man with a hangdog face that seemed drawn into a permanent frown—indeed, he made ex-presidents like Tyler and Fillmore look
dashing by comparison—but perhaps stolid, uncharismatic conservatism was just what the overexcited nation needed.
The Democrats fielded not one but two candidates in 1860. In June, the party had split into regional factions, one of them dominated by Southerners and the other by
Northerners.
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The Southern wing nominated Buchanan’s vice president, a handsome, courtly thirty-nine-year-old Kentuckian named
John Breckinridge. Breckinridge was, personally, no lover of the “peculiar institution”—he hoped that blacks could eventually be freed and resettled in Africa—yet considered himself a proud and loyal Southerner and believed the federal government had no right to interfere with any aspect of slavery, including its expansion into any state or territory. The right to hold slaves was protected, he said, wherever the Stars and Stripes
waved. He had won credentials as a moderate in 1854 when he pronounced an eloquent eulogy over the body of his fellow Kentuckian
Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. Southerners of all persuasions rallied behind Breckinridge as the man most likely to protect the rights of slaveholders by following in the cautious footsteps of Pierce and Buchanan. Indeed, many declared that he was the only major candidate they were willing to accept as the next
president.
By far the most renowned of the four presidential contenders was Douglas, nominee of the Northern Democrats. Douglas was a controversial figure: it was he who had fathered the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, resulting in a
Midwestern bloodbath. Still, he was widely admired as one of the greatest intellects in the
U.S. Senate, perhaps even in all of America. His massive forehead
seemed to bulge out over the rest of his face from the sheer volume of the throbbing brain inside; a
New York Times
correspondent called it “a head most difficult to describe, but one better worth description, in a phrenological aspect, than any other in the country.” The famed orator’s rhetorical style had “nothing of the cavalry slash in its impressiveness, rather resembling a charge of heavy infantry with fixed bayonet.”
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Relentlessly logical, Douglas argued that the Constitution clearly enshrined the right of each state to be governed by its own people. Each new territory should choose its policy on slavery by a fair majority vote—thus, he promised, “burying Northern Abolitionism and Southern Disunionism in a common grave.”
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As for the Republicans, they, too, tacked toward the political center. Although founded six years earlier by antislavery hard-liners, the party had now broadened its platform to embrace popular causes such as protectionist tariffs and a transcontinental railroad. Delegates in 1860
chose Lincoln specifically—with all due respect to Judge Oglesby and his rails—as a man moderate enough to make mainstream voters comfortable. Some expected he
could be an impartial broker who would soothe Northern and Southern tempers alike. Lincoln, one Republican speaker assured an audience in
Ohio, was “a sound conservative man.” A Republican editor promised readers that the party’s nominee, if elected, would “follow a moderate, fair, constitutional course of policy.”
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Perhaps the Illinoisan’s greatest asset as a candidate, actually, was that very few people outside his home state had any strong opinions about him, or even any idea who he was. Many newspaper editors couldn’t even spell his name: he was “Abram” until election day.
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Yet, regardless of the party bosses’ clear intentions, and regardless of their candidate’s tightly closed lips, the Republican campaign of 1860 quickly began to spin out of control, to transform itself into something neither intended nor envisioned.
Perhaps, in retrospect, it did actually have something to do with those fence rails, which for many Americans began to assume proportions that old
John Hanks and his cousin Abe never dreamt of as they cleared that farm along the Sangamon back in the spring of 1830. Most of the great sectional struggles and compromises of the 1850s had hinged on the fate of the new
Western states and territories, such
as
Kansas and Nebraska: whether they would be slave or free, and how to decide the question. Symbols of the pioneer West spoke to the Republicans’ commitment to block the westward spread of slavery. Split rails also powerfully evoked the party’s
“free labor” ideology: a belief in the dignity of the independent workingman, in contrast to the indolent Southern aristocrat whose livelihood
depended on slaves.
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The old pieces of walnut and locust, originally mere stylistic flourishes, became eloquent, while still discreet, antislavery symbols.
Even more potent was the image of Lincoln himself as a rail-splitter. Campaign posters bore crude woodcuts portraying the bookish attorney as—improbably enough—a mighty he-man, sleeves rolled up and muscles bulging as he wielded an enormous mallet. (Even most printers knew that you cut timber with an axe, but you didn’t split rails with one.) For the past two decades, America had been governed mostly by the genteel but weak-spined alumni of the
finest colleges in the East. The White House’s current occupant, Buchanan—“Granny Buck” to his detractors—was openly derided as effeminate, not because of any physical mannerisms, but for his timid impotence in the face of the nation’s looming crises. Lincoln would be a different kind of president. Perhaps some—both supporters and opponents—even hoped the
Rail-Splitter would drive a wedge that would split
North and South forever, solving at a single stroke the conundrum of a nation half slave and half free.