Prelude To War.

As the tensions continued to increase between the slave holding South and the antislavery North, the prelude to war played out.

After the Kansas and Missouri battles in 1855, the battle moved to Congress since Kansas elected both a set of proslavery and antislavery representatives and two governors as well. President Franklin Pierce condemns this act since the federal government had already recognized the proslavery legislature. The Congressional Republicans supported antislavery legislation in Kansas, but Stephen Douglas introduces a bill allowing Kansas statehood only after another constitutional convention there. A few days later, after a speech in which he attacks supporters of slavery, Senator Charles Sumner is beaten with a cane on the Senate floor by Preston Brooks, a Congressman from South Carolina and a nephew of Senator Andrew Butler.

In the spirit of the occasion, South Carolinians sent Brooks dozens of brand new canes, with one bearing the phrase, "Hit him again." The Richmond Enquirer crowed: "We consider the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences. These vulgar abolitionists in the Senate must be lashed into submission." The University of Virginia's Jefferson Literary and Debating Society sent a gold-headed cane to replace Brooks's broken one.

In 1858 between August and October the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates took place. In a series of seven debates. The debates were nothing like we know today, where candidates are tossed softballs by a panel of reporters, and the politicians exchange polite barbs back and forth. This was two men going at it like cage fighters, slugging away, questioning each other, throwing insults. It was not high minded and polite, it was crude, and nasty. It was the hot ticket in town, spectators flocked to watch them go at it.

Douglas went right on the offensive, trying to paint Lincoln as a fanatical abolitionist, a "Black Republican" who wanted to put freed slaves on an equal footing with whites. He promoted what was already a common fear for whites, the idea of black men marrying or sexually white women. It was a typical slaveholder's tactic, and it played to a basic fear among white Americans. Douglas conjured up images of tens of thousands of free slaves sweeping into Illinois territory, taking jobs, and women from white men. When Abolitionist Frederick Douglas visited Illinois during the debates, he was driven through the town of Freeport by a local abolitionist family. Senator Douglas used that to label Lincoln and his party; "If you, Black Republicans, think the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so."

Lincoln defended himself from this "counterfeit logic" "Because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone." He also noted that if the mixing of races were the true concern, slavery had done much more to foster that situation. Of more than 405,000 mulattoes in the United States, nearly 350,000 of them lived in the South. Lincoln even jabbed Douglas further saying that Republicans by excluding slavery in the territories would curtail this "amalgamation" of the races.

In May, 1859, the Southern Commercial Convention states that all laws prohibiting the African slave trade should be repealed, an attempt to overturn the laws put in place in the original Constitutional Convention that ended the slave trade after twenty years from the ratification of the Constitution. In February of 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis introduced a bill saying that the federal government cannot prohibit slavery, but must safeguard the rights of slaveholders.

In May of 1860 the Republicans nominate Abraham Lincoln to run for president. The Democrats convention fell apart on regional lines, with all the Southern delegation walking out. After they left the Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas for president, and the Southern Democrats held their own convention and nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky on the platform calling for the protection of slavery. During the campaign that followed, the Southerners make it very clear that they will secede if Lincoln is elected. After Lincoln was elected, the final address by President Buchanan said that the states have no right to secede, but that the federal government can do nothing to stop them.

Just six weeks after the election, and before Lincoln takes office, on December 20th South Carolina, the most aggressively militant state, called a state convention and votes to secede from the Union. Six days later Major Robert Anderson, who commanded the two federal forts in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, moved his troops to the stronger one of the two, Fort Sumter. The next day, South Carolina troops seize Fort Moultrie and take over the federal arsenal at Charleston.
On December 31st, President Buchanan announces that Fort Sumter will be defended against attack and orders that Stars of the West to sail there with supplies.

From November 1860 to Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861 were very tense times, the nation held their collective breaths. Before Lincoln entered office, the first states of the Confederacy had left the Union. Eleven federal arsenals and forts in the South had been seized by state militias. Lame duck president James Buchanan wanted to leave office with the country at peace. However, South Carolina, the first and most aggressive of the seceded states, was moving toward a war footing.

In back rooms of Congress and at a Peace Conference presided over by former President John Tyler, who would become the only former president to join the Confederacy, well meaning politicians on both sides tried to find a way to keep the peace. One Mississippi Senator tried to advise the South Carolina governor to proceed cautiously, especially regarding Fort Sumter, and unfinished and obscure federal fort in Charleston Harbor. "The little garrison in its present position presses on nothing but a point of pride," said the senator, "We are probably soon to be involved in hat fiercest of human strife, a civil war." That was Senator Jefferson Davis.