Summary

Alexander K. McClure was the Republican Party leader in Franklin and a national party operative whose leadership in 1860 helped Lincoln carry Pennsylvania.

EXCERPT:

"A decided political revolution was generally expected in 1860, but none then dreamed that it would mean anything more than merely halting the extension of the slave power, and liberalizing the policy of the government in the support of free industries against the slave labor of the South. Had it been generally believed in 1860 that the election of Lincoln would bring the bloodiest civil war of modern times, and the sudden and complete overthrow of slavery at the point of the bayonet, it is doubtful whether the popular vote of the country would have invited such an appalling entertainment. The sectional feeling was greatly intensified by the earnest and constantly growing agitation that began with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 and had continued to convulse the country by the desperate struggles over Kansas, with the battle for a free State then unsettled. The North believed that the South was more bombastic than earnest in the threat of provoking civil war for the protection of slavery, and the South believed that the Northern people were mere money-getters, ready to yield anything rather than accept fratricidal conflict.

Had the North and the South justly understood each other, as they should have done when remembering the common heroism exhibited by Northern and Southern soldiers on every battlefield, there would have been no civil war. It was common in those days to hear demagogues on the stump in the North declare that, in the event of secession, the women of the North would sweep away the bombastic South with their brooms, and like demagogues of the South told how, in the event of civil war, they would march to Boston and command their obedient slaves on Bunker Hill. How it was possible for the bravest and noblest people of the world thus to misunderstand each other merely because of irritating sectional divisions, must be incomprehensible to any intelligent student of the present day. The people of the North and the South were of the same blood; they had the same proud traditions; their heroism and their grandeur in field and forum had been established side by side in every triumph, and only the madness of the fiercest passion could have made either section assume that cowardice could be an attribute of the American people, North or South. The most fearful atonement was made for this strange misunderstanding of each other, and there is nothing in Grecian or Roman story that equals the heroism of the soldiers of the blue and gray in four years of bloodiest conflict." (385-86)

"In Franklin, Democratic and Republican activists were strikingly similar in their relative household wealth, farm size, and farm values, but had different occupational and social profiles, with the Republicans appearing more 'respectable.' "

"In the heat of the campaign of 1860 both Franklin Democrats and Republicans shifted their emphasis on slavery."