Coming Fury, Volume 1 Read Free

he warned his Ohio readers that a strong wind was blowing. From Atlanta hesent an account of a conversation in a day coach. A Georgia delegate, convention-bound, had announced loudly that Senator Douglas just would not do. If nominated, Douglas would probably get the delegate’s vote, but it would be cast with great reluctance; the delegate knew of but one other man in his district who would vote for this man from Illinois. Another Georgian, present as an observer—he had been beaten in his own race for delegate—disagreed: Douglas men were as thick as blackberries in his part of the state, and if Douglas got the nomination he would carry Georgia by 20,000—“there will be such a war whoop as never was heard in the land.” When someone protested that Douglas’s famous doctrine of popular sovereignty was no better than rank abolitionism, this supporter said that he himself “went the whole of it,” and he was backed by a delegate from Kentucky. But the delegate from Georgia said that the nominee must be someone who could unite the party, not a man who was obnoxious to a whole section: not, to be specific, Stephen A. Douglas, who had recently stood side by side with the Black Republicans themselves.
    The Democracy unquestionably needed unity, but the unity might be hard to get. Halstead’s train paused one evening at a station stop in Georgia to let the passengers get out for dinner, and at table two Mississippians broke out a bottle of whisky, passed it around, and offered a toast “to the health of the nominee.” Did this, asked a man from Indiana (no doubt bristling a little), include Senator Douglas? Mississippi replied that it did not: Douglas was simply not in the running, and because he could not possibly be the nominee an offer to toast the nominee’s health could not apply to him. Indiana thought this unfair, and said that if Douglas won the nomination he ought to have the support of a united party: delegates could not in honor go to the convention and then bolt the nominee if they did not like him. As an afterthought, the Northerner asked why Indiana did not have as much right to criticize Mississippi’s Senator Jefferson Davis as Mississippi had to criticize Senator Douglas. One of the Mississippians retorted that the reason was simple: “Davis was a patriot and Douglas was a traitor, d—d little better than Seward—that was the difference.” Indiana protested that Douglas and the Northern Democrats had been fighting the South’s battles, but this helped not at all. TheSouth, said a Mississippian, could fight her own battles and protect her own rights, and if she could not do this in the Union, she would do it outside of the Union. Halstead wrote that other delegates at the table shook their heads and muttered that the party was in for stormy times. 8
    So ran the talk on the trains. Reaching Charleston, many of the Douglas men tended to be quieter; the Little Giant had his enemies here, and there was no sense in stirring them up with loose talk. As convention time drew nearer, it seemed that the Douglas people were making headway. Three nights before the convention would open, the correspondent of the Richmond
Dispatch
was writing that “Douglas is hourly becoming less objectionable,” and was explaining that personal antagonisms were subsiding and that the success of the party was the main object. The friends of Douglas, he said, were quietly meeting Southern delegates as they arrived and were trying to convince them that nothing but the nomination of Douglas would counter-balance the anticipated nomination of Seward at Chicago. As a clincher, there was the statement: Douglas was the only Democrat who could possibly win the fall election. 9
    It was a good argument, with men who thought victory in November important. There were 303 electoral votes, and a man who could get 152 of them would be the next President. If the party held its unity, the Democratic nominee should get 120 votes in the South