Coming Fury, Volume 1 Read Free Page A

and along the border; as of April 23 it seemed highly probable that Douglas could pick up the thirty-two additional votes in the North or in the Northwest no matter what the Republicans might do. No other Democrat could conceivably do as well. It was an open-and-shut case.
    But the argument was worse than useless with men who wanted something else a great deal more than they wanted a Democratic victory in the fall, and although such men were in a small minority, they were working in Charleston with vast energy and singleness of purpose. These men, the all-out fire-eating secessionists, believed that they could get what they wanted if the party lost the election. Beyond the wrangling over platform and candidate they could see a completely new nation, an independent South embodying the most soaring dreams of the cotton empire, zealously preserving the peculiar institution and the complex values that rested on it.A beating in November might bring this to pass. Most Southerners were not yet ready to embrace secession, much as the business had been talked about in the past ten years, but the profound shock of a Black Republican victory would almost certainly make them ready. Such men as Yancey, who wanted to see this shock applied, refused even to talk about concessions or party unity.
    Yet until the convention actually opened, none of this would come to a head and it was possible to accept this meeting in Charleston as just another political convention. On the surface that was what it looked like. Hotel lobbies had the aspect that hotel lobbies always have during political conventions. There were bands, striking up appropriate tunes at odd moments, and there were impromptu orators to address anyone who would listen. Most of the 4000 visitors, it was reported, hardly went to bed at all, which was not surprising, since the bedrooms were so crowded and the nights were so noisy, and there was a good deal of drunken rowdyism—most of it, as a Northerner admitted, contributed by “roughs from New York,” whose delegation, led by smooth Fernando Wood, seemed prepared to be all things to all men, with special reference to the men who could offer the best deal. Everywhere there were the perennial political types, moving with dignity about the lobbies, lounging against veranda pillars and railings, being vocal and visible. There were men who seemed to have spent so much time in the public eye that merely being looked at had put its mark on them; there were cold-eyed operators who looked like professional gamblers, and there were stout, perspiring men in glossy black, wearing fine linen and stovepipe hats, carrying gold-headed canes, eternally busy with portentous whispered conversations with other men who looked exactly like them. 10
    Among those who could be seen in the lobbies were certain Northerners of whom the South would see much more, in the years just ahead. There was John Logan, of Illinois, with his thick, black hair and his piercing black eyes, his back against a veranda pillar, meditatively chewing tobacco; and there was another man from Illinois, John A. McClernand, with his bristly beard and his hawk-beaked face, watching the crowd and toying absently with his watch chain. Not least of the group was Benjamin Butler, of Massachusetts, bald-headed and cock-eyed, “with the little brownmustache under his sharp crooked nose”—Ben Butler, who could never forget the demands made by his soaring ambition, or the concessions that might have to be made to it, an unpredictable man who was known now as a firm friend of the South. Two years earlier Jefferson Davis had made a Fourth of July speech in the North, expressing love for the Union and deriding the chance that secessionists could do any lasting harm; Butler had liked the speech, and he was here as a fervent supporter of the Senator from Mississippi.
     … Editor Halstead believed more and more strongly that the current was beginning to run the wrong way, as far as Senator