Lincoln, the unknown

114 • LINCOLN THE UNKNOWNin twenty would have given the Northwest to Douglas andthrown the election into the House of Representatives, wherethe South would have won.In nine Southern States no one cast a Republican ballot.Think of it. In all Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana,Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas not oneman voted for Abraham Lincoln. This was ominous.To appreciate what happened immediately after Lincoln'selection, we must review the story of a movement that had ragedover the North like a hurricane. For thirty years a fanaticalgroup, obsessed by a holy zeal for the destruction of slavery,had been preparing the country for war. During all that timean unbroken stream of vitriolic pamphlets and bitter books hadflowed from their presses; and paid lecturers had visited everycity, town, and hamlet in the North, exhibiting the tattered,filthy garments worn by slaves, displaying their chains and manacles,holding up bloodstained whips and spiked collars andother instruments of torture. Escaped slaves themselves werepressed into service and toured the country, giving inflammatoryaccounts of brutalities they had seen and atrocities theyhad endured.In 1839 the American Anti-Slavery Society issued a bookletentitled "American Slavery As It Is—The Testimony of 1,000Witnesses." In this pamphlet, eye-witnesses related specific instancesof cruelties they had observed: slaves had had theirhands plunged into boiling water, they had been branded withred-hot irons, their teeth had been knocked out, they had beenstabbed with knives, their flesh had been torn by bloodhounds,they had been whipped until they died, had been burned at thestake. Shrieking mothers had had their children torn from themforever and sold in the slave-pen and on the auction-block.Women were whipped because they did not bear more children,and strong white men with big bones and large muscles wereoffered twenty-five dollars for cohabiting with black women,since light-colored children sold for more money, especially ifthey were girls.The favorite and most flaming indictment of the Abolitionistwas miscegenation. Southern men were accused of cherishingnegro slavery because of their love of "unbridled licentiousness.""The South," cried Wendell Phillips, "is one great brothelwhere half a million women are flogged to prostitution."