Paul

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On the sixth of November, 1860, the American people cast their ballots in a presidential election that would decide not merely who occupied the White House, but whether the Union forged by Washington and Madison could survive the sectional passions that had been rising for a generation. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, the rail-splitter turned lawyer and the first candidate of the young Republican Party, carried the day with 180 electoral votes out of 303. He took roughly 1.866 million popular votes—39.8 percent of the total—yet his name did not appear on the ballot in ten Southern states. The opposition, once the dominant force in American politics, had shattered into three contending factions, and the arithmetic of the Electoral College delivered the presidency to a man the Deep South had already resolved to treat as an existential threat. The Democratic Party that had controlled the White House for most of the previous thirty years could not hold itself together. At Charleston and then at Baltimore the convention split. Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” of Illinois who had championed popular sovereignty in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, became the nominee of the Northern Democrats and ran with Herschel V. Johnson. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the sitting vice president and the choice of the Southern rights men, stood on a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories; his running mate was Joseph Lane of Oregon. A fourth ticket, the Constitutional Union Party, offered John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts under the simple banner of “the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the laws.” Douglas finished second in the popular vote yet won only Missouri and part of New Jersey—12 electoral votes. Breckinridge swept the cotton states and took 72 electors. Bell carried the border states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and gathered 39. Lincoln swept the free states of the North and West and nothing else. The campaign itself had been fought largely in the North. Lincoln stayed home in Springfield, speaking little, while Douglas raced across the country in a desperate effort to hold the Union together. In the South, Republican electors were not even permitted in many places; Lincoln’s support there was negligible or nonexistent. When the returns confirmed his victory, the reaction was immediate and uncompromising. South Carolina’s legislature called a convention; on December 20 the state adopted an ordinance of secession. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed in rapid succession before Lincoln was inaugurated. The long compromise era—Missouri, 1850, Kansas-Nebraska—had ended. A minority president, chosen by a sectional party that had made opposition to the expansion of slavery its central principle, now faced a dissolving Union. The election of 1860 did not invent the crisis; it revealed that the crisis could no longer be postponed. Four candidates, four visions of the American future, and one electoral verdict that the Southern states refused to accept. The war that followed would decide by force of arms what the ballot box of 1860 could not settle. America 250 🇺🇸

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On the fifth of November 1773, the freemen of Boston packed Faneuil Hall for a town meeting that would help decide whether America would remain free or become a tributary of a distant Parliament. They chose John Hancock moderator. The merchant-patriot who would one day scrawl the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence now sat in the chair and faced the first great test of whether the people would accept a gilded chain. The Tea Act had arrived that spring dressed as a favor. The East India Company, bloated and near ruin, was granted the exclusive right to dump its surplus tea on the colonies while the Townshend duty of threepence on the pound still clung to every chest. The price would undercut the Dutch smuggled leaf the colonists preferred. Parliament and the Company expected gratitude. Boston saw the snare. Once the duty was paid on even a single chest, the principle of taxation without representation was conceded forever. Assemblies would become ornaments. Governors and judges would draw their salaries from London. The assemblies the colonists had built across generations would be rendered useless. Arbitrary government would follow as night follows day. The meeting adopted, almost word for word, the resolves already passed by the freemen of Philadelphia. Freemen possess an inherent right to dispose of their own property. There can be no property in that which another may take without consent. The duty on tea is a tax levied on Americans without their agreement. Its purpose—to support government, administer justice, and defend the King’s dominions in America—tends directly to render colonial assemblies useless and to introduce arbitrary government and slavery. The East India Company’s decision to ship the tea subject to that duty is an open attempt to enforce the ministerial plan and a violent attack upon the liberties of America. It is the duty of every American to oppose this attempt. Then came the sentence that still rings like a rifle shot across two and a half centuries: whoever shall directly or indirectly countenance this attempt, or in any wise aid or abet in unloading, receiving, or vending the tea sent or to be sent by the East India Company while it remains subject to the duty, is an enemy to America. No one in the crowded hall rose to defend the landing of the tea. A committee headed by Moderator Hancock himself was sent to the consignees with the demand that they resign their appointments at once, for the peace of the town and the honor of their own names. The consignees refused. Their answers were voted “daringly affrontive.” Some in the meeting spoke of taking up arms; the words drew applause. Yet the town kept its discipline. It expected every merchant to refuse the dutied tea under any pretext. It dissolved itself having drawn a line that could not be mistaken. This was no mob. This was a legal assembly of freeholders and inhabitants, moderated by one of the richest men in the province, speaking in the language of English liberty itself. They understood what too many later generations forgot: a right surrendered in a cup of tea is a right surrendered in every other thing. Six weeks later the ships still rode in the harbor, the consignees still would not yield, and the same spirit that filled Faneuil Hall on that November morning emptied three hundred and forty-two chests into Boston Harbor. The meeting of November fifth did not start the Revolution, but it named the enemy and declared the duty. When Hancock put his name to the Declaration three years later, the ink was only the final ratification of the stand already taken under his gavel. America 250 🇺🇸