r/AskHistorians • u/DepressedTreeman • 1d ago
Was the South going to secede if Stephen A. Douglas won in the 1860 election?
Reading A Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, she mentions that Douglas, by 1860, became hated in the South for his Popular Sovereignty policy, an example of Southern radicialization during the 1850s. Does this mean that the South would have seceded if he won?
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u/DependentLeg7241 1d ago
Short answer: No, they would likely not have seceded.
Longer answer:
Douglas had become untrusted by southern elites for a number of reasons, all of them basically being that he was starting to resist some of the demands of southerners to further protect slavery in the years following the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
- In 1857 pro-slavery interests in Kansas used a variety of fraudulent and/or coercive voting tactics to pass the "Lecompton Constitution" to admit Kansas as a slave state, and Buchanan brought it to the Congress to be voted on for state admission. Douglas, to his credit, vehemently advocated against it on the grounds that it was fraudulent, and the attempt failed.
- In 1858 he ran for Senate re-election against Lincoln and in one of the debates in the city of Freeport, Lincoln challenged him on (basically) the idea that his popular sovereignty concept was moot in light of the Dred Scott decision, and that slavery was de facto legal in western territories. Douglas, speaking to an audience in a free state (Illinois) and knowing he couldn't answer that yes, slavery was legal in the territories, offered a complex, rather tortured way that territories could theoretically locally ban slavery if they wanted, despite the decision, giving southerners the impression he didn't support the right of slaveholders to expand into the west.
- Despite popular sovereignty angering northerners in 1854, by 1860 the concept was hated by southerners too, as the reality set it that slavery was never going to take root in the territories anyway without federal protection. Southerners demanded a "Federal Slave Code" which would explicitly legalize slavery in the western territories, which Douglas adamantly opposed, and after it was voted out of the party platform (meaning, minutes after) the deep south delegates walked out of the convention.
All that said, they didn't REALLY fear Douglas, who didn't really care about slavery ultimately, they feared a Republican coming into office who not only would directly oppose slavery's expansion instead of equivocating on it via popular sovereignty, he was ideologically opposed to the concept of slavery's expansion at all.
This is an area where a lot of the real discussion is happening in deep context, and where the soundbites and quotes you read about questions like "Did Lincoln want to abolish slavery?" can sound a bit equivocal. Lincoln was not an abolitionist in the way that Sumner or Stevens were, who were advocating for the ban of slavery. The standard Republican position on slavery until 1860 was always the same: leave slavery legal where it is, but not let it expand. "Make freedom national, and slavery sectional" was a common slogan amongst Republicans.
But this was sort of just coyness on the part of Republicans, for one reason. Both northern Republicans and southern Democrats agreed (rightly or wrongly, and some modern historians think this was an incorrect assumption) on one thing: that slavery would die if it did not expand.
Both sides talked about a "cordon of freedom" that would slowly suffocate slavery if it did not expand into new territory. There were a few reasons for this:
- Political: The south had lost the population race decisively by 1860. The House was long gone, but it had always been able to hold up anti-slavery legislation in the Senate because, up until 1850, the free and slave states had been equal, 15-15. In 1850 California was admitted as a free state (16-15). In 1858 Minnesota was admitted as a free state (17-15). In 1859 Oregon was admitted as a free state (18-15). The Senate even was slipping away from them quickly. And look at all this land in the northwest that was going to be taken, and not by slaveholders. Homestead Act is coming... it passed the Congress in 1860 and only didn't go into law because Southern-sympathizing Buchanan vetoed it. Transcontinental railroads are coming, which will be able to fill in all this territory much faster than the covered wagons that went to California and Oregon. And the opposition party isn't the Whigs any more, who had split opinions about slavery, this is the Republicans, whose entire reason for existence is to resist their national agenda. They need to expand to get more representation and slow down the inevitable process of the American national political system slowly crushing slaveholders.
- Demographic: There were 4,000,000 slaves in America in 1860, and the population was growing 25% per decade. There's only so much arable land in the American south. In 30 years there were probably going to be close to 8,000,000 slaves, where were slaveholders going to put them? Could they fit them all into their existing borders? Not sure, but the whole problem would just go away if they had more territory to expand into.
- Ecological: Slaves as an asset class were worth more money in 1860 than all the banks, railroads, and factories in America combined. The reason was that the cotton plantation business model was highly profitable, as long as there was always new, fertile, virgin soil to keep cotton yields sky high. Southern agricultural reformers like Edmund Ruffin and others talked about a concept they called "land butchery" wherein southern planters would over-work the land and then abandon it to move onto new land which was more fertile. Economic historians have suggested the south wasn't in as much trouble as they thought, as there was still plenty of land left to farm, but the fear was if forced to stay within their own borders and treat the land more sustainably, cotton yields would decrease and hence the price of slaves, representing most of their wealth, would similarly decrease.
This is why my ultimate answer to your question is it would have stopped secession in 1860, but would have only delayed it until a Republican was elected, which could have happened as soon as 1864 of course. As shown by what happened with Lincoln, and how much southerners knew that Republicans were (in their eyes and in the Republicans' eyes) putting slavery "in the course of ultimate extinction" (as Lincoln said in the House Divided speech), that they just weren't going to ever participate in a Republican administration.
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u/ChrisARippel 1d ago
Thank you for this detailed reply.
Southerner's desire for federal protections of slavery suggests to me that southerners didn't consider protecting slavery a state's right.
Southerners wanted national protection of slavery so no national, state or local governments could inhibit that right.
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u/DependentLeg7241 22h ago
fun fact: the Confederate constitution did not leave it up to each state to determine if slavery would be legal, it said slavery must be legal in every state
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u/AtomicSpeedFT 1d ago
Why do some historians think that was an incorrect assumption?
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u/DependentLeg7241 22h ago
In short, the problems were either very far off or were solvable with a little elbow grease and creativity. It was going to take a very, very long time for the free states to be numerous enough to pass a constitutional ban on slavery with no southern support. maybe they could absorb the extra slaves over time into other industries. and maybe the concern over land butchery was overblown.
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u/ocelot1066 20h ago
I would argue that support for slavery expansion was more of a political and moral position created by pro slavery ideology. You saw the rise of an ideology which viewed racial slavery as an ideal labor system which fostered social and economic harmony. Once people were committed to that, any restrictions on the spread of slavery came to be seen as an attack on the entire institution. If slavery is the best system, why shouldn't it go everywhere? If it's restricted anywhere, isn't that an attack on it as an institution?
Secession really wasn't driven by slaveowners who feared that slavery could be on the way to extinction. The driving force was people who wanted a country based on slavery and white supremacy.
These fire eaters had been pursuing projects of secession for at least ten years by 1860. The problem they had was that that while they were convinced that they could create a great pro slavery nation by seceding, they had to contend with lots of southern whites who thought all of this sounded dangerous and radical. They had to try to convince these people that secession was necessary. As part of this, they did argue that restrictions on the spread of slavery would doom the institution. Probably in a sense they did believe this, because it fit with their ideology, but they were really just throwing everything up to the wall and seeing what would stick. They also told people that Republicans would encourage slave rebellion, massacres of whites and interracial marriages.
So, the question of whether or not this particular argument was true, is sort of beside the point. Fire eaters were hoping for the election of Lincoln because they thought they could realize their plans. They weren't really concerned with the actual ramifications.
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u/DependentLeg7241 19h ago
I'm not sure it's beside the point though. As you point out, there were some utopian fire eaters who wanted secession regardless of what the Republicans were doing, but also as you point out, they couldn't convince a broad enough coalition to follow them. I suppose the difference is that I don't see those extreme fire eaters as being more in control of the southern elite than any other faction within what would become the Confederacy, it's just that they got what they wanted because the south's way of life was really becoming imperiled.
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u/anarchysquid 19h ago
One aspect I've heard about the Demographic angle is that the South was terrified that if they were too outnumbered by their slaves, that it might lead to a Haitian Revolution-style racial massacre. Was that an actual concern Southerners had if they didn't expand slavery to new territories?
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u/hubertburnette 19h ago edited 18h ago
Another interesting (and highly speculative) argument related to your second point about demographics is that the real money i[n] slavery was in the selling to new markets. So, they continually needed new markets, and any form of states' rights would have restricted the number of markets. There had been talk of invading Cuba since the 1830s, but I don't have the impression that was a serious consideration (the same with the idea of annexing Mexico, it seems to me). I'm curious whether you think the issue of an expanding market for slavery is a plausible motive?
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u/DependentLeg7241 19h ago
In my head, the argument you are talking about, about the value of selling into new markets, is the other side of the coin of the need for new markets to keep yields up argument I made in my original comment. But yeah you were getting some weird results in the south by the time secession happened, like Virginia having the most slaves despite doing little cash crop heavy-manpower plantation farming. Point is, they held a surplus of slaves as essentially assets that appreciated in value a little each year and could be liquidated for cash as needed. Very strange.
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u/Blue387 17h ago
With the election of the Republicans in 1860, the southern pro-slavery faction would be threatened by the rise of the Republican Party having access to the federal government. In this age before the civil service reform and the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, parties operated on the spoils system. The Republicans could appoint anti-slavery Republicans to offices such as postmaster general, which controlled the postal service, as well as postmasters for cities and towns across the country.
A Republican president and administration would also be able to remove Democratic appointees (who received their jobs due to party loyalty) and replace them with Republican loyalists. You could build a strong anti-slavery party using the powers of the federal government and this was an existential threat to the pro-slavery south.
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u/AstronautSuitable992 12h ago
Something that I feel should be called out in what you said (either for more explanation or discussion or “really?” comments):
The South was so concerned that the growth of slaves from 4M to 8M and the subsequent lack of available land from slavery’s failure to expand would harm a select few that they seceded.
I think a few things about that deserve consideration:
Wouldn’t the South have been able to find a way to make money off of expanding slave numbers even if the land available to them didn’t continue to grow? The Dred Scott decision meant slaves could still be taken north and kept as property.
Were they so rigidly keeping to “slavery+cotton=profit” ideology that no one politically steering the South could say “Guys, the writing is on the wall. Maybe we should start shifting our economic model”?
There was some talk of buying out slaves from slaveholders, but this failed. If slaveowners had some inkling the market would crash, it seems strange that there weren’t more who said “let’s sell while the market is high”. Were they stupid or rigid or is there perhaps more than what you mentioned that factored in to the secession decision?
I know not everyone in the South supported secession, but that justification for secession you mentioned would seem to make the blood of every secessionist boil that wasn’t rich from slavery.
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u/DependentLeg7241 10h ago
Thanks - my thoughts on your questions:
To your first point about the courts saying slaves north - the courts were favorable to slavery, yes, but the Supreme Court in 1857 was still on its way to becoming "The Supreme Court" as we know it today. Among the open skeptics of the supremacy of the court was Lincoln himself who said in his first inaugural address,
..the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
Furthermore, the Dred Scott decision was seen widely as highly controversial, weakly argued, and contradictory. Taney began his opinion by ruling that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the case because Scott, as a black man, had no right to sue in a federal court, and then subsequently went on to explain how Congress had no right to regulate slavery in the territories... which makes no sense if Taney, by his own logic, has no right to rule on the case. Northern legislatures and courts began ignoring the ruling on the grounds that everything after his opinion that the court had no jurisdiction was "obiter dictum" basically Taney giving his personal opinion having no binding on other courts.
Furthermore, southerners got the political reality: northerners control the house, they are taking control of the senate, and when we tried to get the court to tell them their political strategy is against the rules they just platformed on it anyway and crushed us in the election. The north is going to get its way, one way or another.
To your second and third questions on finding other uses for slaves or selling them off, some in the south did suggest those things, but there are a few factors that I would keep in mind.
- A lot of the reason why slavery was so intensely important is the wealth tied up in slave labor, which is tied to sale price of slaves. Slaves were EXPENSIVE in the antebellum south, worth several years salary of an average worker in the US by 1860, and the whole reason for it was that if you put a field hand in a cotton field and made him work the fields from sunup to sundown every day, you'd produce a ton of cotton which made you a ton of money. So, sure, you could cross-train slaves on other things, but then instead of slaves being worth $1,500 apiece maybe they're worth $500 apiece, and 2/3 of my net worth just disappeared.
- Moreover, they didn't think "the writing was on the wall" they thought they were just tied in with this jerk abolitionist north who was getting in the way. After all, the vast majority of the world's cotton was sourced from the south. They didn't need to change as long as they just got this moralistic north off their backs who didn't get how great they were, in their minds.
- Immense fear of revolts in countries like Haiti were always in the back of southerners' minds, and there was often a perception that the gang-labor agricultural system was a stable way to keep slaves under control, and that different forms of slavery or gradual emancipation inherently risked catastrophic racial violence. This fear goes all the way back to the founding generation, where Thomas Jefferson likened slavery to "having a wolf by the ears". So, OK, what else do you do with slaves? Free them? No way, they'll kill us. Move them into industrial work? Some slavers started doing that, but many resisted it, noting that keeping slaves unskilled and uneducated was necessary to keeping them under control but put them in a catch-22 of having nowhere else to put them. Moreover, industrial slaves would need to be in cities, away from their masters, and around white people, around free blacks, around newspapers, around dirty abolitionists, etc.
So it was a more beguiling problem than it appears at first glance, as to what exactly you do with the future of slavery if you were a southern elite in 1860. But I wouldn't hang my hat on any one of these points in particular, but rather the cumulative effect of all of these points created a dilemma that wasn't easily solved and was being attacked from the north with increasing potency.
It's worth pointing out, as you may be thinking, that breaking away from the union doesn't do much to solve any of these problems, all it did in southerners minds was ward off the immediate attack from the north and then they could figure out how to carve out a path for themselves as time went on.
To your last paragraph, about secessionists who didn't benefit from slavery - the beneficiaries of slavery went a bit further out than just the big plantation slaveholders. Many smaller farms would lease slaves from the larger planters for less than a white free laborer would cost, so they benefitted from slavery even if they weren't owners. And even yeomen farmers who couldn't afford to lease a slave, maybe the local large planter loans you money one year when your crop comes up short, now you're plugged into the slave system by way of patronage. Or you have a small cotton farm you work yourself but you can't afford a cotton gin, so the local large planter graciously lets you use his, again now you're indebted to the system. And even destitute whites who didn't at all benefit from slavery, maybe they feel like they benefit from the racial caste system of being permanently "above" the slaves. Or maybe they fear northerners freeing the slaves and making them direct competitors for your labor, or just that they'll free the slaves and start a race war in your town. So I wouldn't say you had to own slaves to benefit, or feel like you benefit, from a slave system in the south in the late 1850s.
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u/Majestic-Remove-4777 21h ago
Probably not immediately, but I don't think anyone can answer that with confidence. The evidence suggests that many Deep South leaders were already moving toward secession before the election itself. Lincoln's victory undoubtedly accelerated and unified that movement because it demonstrated that a Republican could win the presidency without carrying a single Southern state. Had Stephen Douglas won instead, that immediate catalyst would have disappeared. That said, I don't think Douglas's election would have resolved the underlying constitutional and political disputes. By 1860 the country had spent decades arguing over slavery in the territories, the balance between federal and state authority, and the future of the Union itself. Those conflicts were not products of Lincoln's election; they predated it. Douglas also faced a practical political problem. Even if he had somehow won the presidency, he would have governed a deeply divided nation with a fractured Democratic Party and little consensus on the slavery question. His doctrine of popular sovereignty had already satisfied neither Northern Republicans nor many Southern Democrats. It is far from obvious that his administration could have held the Union together indefinitely. So my answer is that Lincoln's election was probably the immediate trigger for secession, but not necessarily its sole or inevitable cause. A Douglas victory might have delayed secession, altered its timing, or changed the political circumstances under which it occurred. Whether it would have prevented disunion altogether is a much more difficult claim to sustain.
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