While President Lincoln was busy saving the Union and freeing the slaves, five former presidents tried to stop him.
As America slid toward disunion and war, the 1860 election pushed the former presidents off the sidelines. Franklin Pierce, who left the White House in 1857, tried to recruit his former secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, to run for president. John Tyler, who’d been out of office for 15 years, wanted the job for himself and authorized his friends to put his name forward if the opportunity arose. (It did not.)
When the Democratic Party collapsed into Northern and Southern factions during the campaign, Pierce, Tyler and James Buchanan supported John C. Breckinridge, the nominee of the Southern Democrats; Martin Van Buren supported Stephen Douglas, chosen by the party’s Northern wing. Tyler and Van Buren proposed that Democratic electors band together to deny Lincoln the presidency by voting for whichever of his opponents had the most support.
Despite their political differences, the former presidents all saw the role of president as conciliator in chief, whose main objective was to keep the union together, generally by making concessions to the South. They regarded the election of Abraham Lincoln, with his firm commitment to end the expansion of slavery, as menacing the presidency and the union itself.
The five were all about maintaining the Union at any cost, even if that meant accommodating the southern slave states. They advocated extending the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific Coast and, in diametric opposition to Lincoln's goals, expanding slavery in the western territories.
Unsurprisingly, they were Democratics.
The Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri. The 1820 passage of Missouri Compromise took place during the presidency of James Monroe.
The Missouri Compromise was implicitly repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, submitted to Congress by Stephen A. Douglas in January 1854. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission of slave states by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through "popular sovereignty" whether they would allow slavery within each territory. Thus, the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively undermined the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36°30′ latitude which had been established by the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by Free Soilers and many abolitionist Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South, and led to the creation of the Republican Party.
Despite what the Left would have you believe, Democratics have always been about slavery. The Lincoln-Douglas debates (one of which took place at Old Main on the campus of my old alma mater, Knox College) were really all about the direction our country would take. Douglas, as noted above, was clearly a Democrat slavery expansionist; Lincoln argued against it.
When our Civil War occurred, it should be noted that the ever politically-correct Britain planned to fight with the slave-holding south.
With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln broadened the Union’s objective from reunion to the destruction of slavery. He then lost the support of Fillmore and Buchanan, whose sole condition for peace had been status quo antebellum. Lincoln believed that while America should return to what it had been geographically, it could never return to being “half slave and half free.”
The Democrat response, of course, involved the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan and the enactment of Jim Crow laws. Democratics have historically been all about slavery, and that remains their goal to this day. But they have evolved: it's not about the color of your skin any longer; they now want everyone to serve them.
