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The center could not hold amid a flood of passionate intensity recorded
in this illuminating study of the 1860 election campaign. Historian
Egerton (Death or Liberty) chronicles the year's chaotic political
wranglings, from the fractious party conventions that threw up four
presidential contenders (two from minor parties) to the search for a
congressional compromise to save the Union on the eve of Lincoln's
inauguration.
An energized antislavery Republican Party supported
Lincoln, unwittingly aided by cagey Southern radicals William Yancey and
Robert Rhett, who, Egerton argues, conspired to split their own
Democratic party in order to guarantee Lincoln's victory and thus obtain
a pretext for secession. In the doomed middle are Stephen Douglas and
other moderates trying to preserve the nation with proslavery
compromises that infuriated the North without appeasing the South.
This
is politics as high drama, and Egerton does it justice with his lucid,
meticulous account of backroom deals, parliamentary brawling, and
speeches whose rhetorical vitriol (one Republican convention speaker
called Southerners the whole vassalage of hell ) presaged violence.
Also fine is Egerton's analysis of the human motivations that tore the
country apart.
