The Campaign Union championed the Constitutional Union ticket of John Bell, the presidential nominee from Tennessee, and Edward Everett, the vice-presidential nominee from Massachusetts.  The Boston Courier published the party organ initially every Friday, and then twice weekly during the last few weeks of the campaign.  HarpWeek is making available 11 issues dated between July 27 and October 26, 1860.

In its inaugural issue of July 27, The Campaign Union was already on the defensive against the Republican Party’s boast that its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was already assured of winning the presidential election.  The journal dismissed the claim as mere “baseless expectations … [not] resting upon existing political facts.”  However, it admitted that the hopes of Constitutional Unionists relied on the assumption that the election would be decided in the House of Representatives, where Bell would be the likely winner.  It predicted that Bell would win several (perhaps a majority) of the slave states (because of the divided Democratic Party), and Lincoln would lose the free states of California, Indiana, and New Jersey.  Thus, Bell would finish second to Lincoln in the Electoral College, but the lack of any candidate’s majority would send the election to the U.S. House.

The Electoral College scenario was the subject of an informative newspaper debate between the Boston Daily Advertiser, a Republican journal, and the Boston Courier, parent publication of The Campaign Union, which reprinted the detailed arguments of both sides.  The Daily Advertiser pointed out that the Constitutional provision for presidential election by the House was intended to be the exception, not the rule as the Bell forces were trying to make it.  Furthermore, the vote cast by congressmen elected two years before the 1860 presidential election, and on a basis of state equality (unlike the Electoral College), would thwart the public will.  The Courier responded that dubious tactics at the Republican Convention had forced the nomination of Lincoln, and that election by the people’s representatives in the House was fully in accord with the framers’ intentions and was no less democratic than one by electors.  The debate also provides a glimpse into the morals of the time in the Courier’s chastisement of the Advertiser for using horseracing slang, “the inside track.”

Numerous speeches of both supporters and opponents are printed, excerpted, or paraphrased in The Campaign Union.  The newspaper often used the orations of Washington Hunt, the former governor of New York (1851-1853), to present the Constitutional Union perspective.  Hunt reasoned that the other three parties were sectional in nature, leaving only the Constitutional Union able to “claim to be purely national in its character and principles.”  He defended the vagueness of the Constitutional Union platform:  “The paramount object of the Convention was to arrest strife and proclaim peace and union between the sections.  Instead of wasting time in contriving the ambiguities of a platform to delude and mislead the people, they resolved to stand by the Union as it is, and abide by the Constitution according to its true indent and meaning.”  He argued that the issue of slavery was a false one because the remaining American territories were not suitable to slave labor (a view also held by Stephen Douglas).

Nevertheless, The Campaign Union took considerable space to link the Republican Party with abolitionism, including the violence of John Brown.  It analyzed the Republican platform to reveal it as a deceptive document intended to placate abolitionists, and charged that Republican state governments were acting unconstitutionally by not cooperating in the return of fugitive slaves.  The journal criticized the Massachusetts legislature for supporting Charles Sumner, the leading abolitionist in the U.S. Senate, and made a sustained effort to associate John Andrews, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, with support of Brown.

The Campaign Union recognized a non-abolitionist element in the Republican Party, primarily those in the Midwest and West who wanted blacks excluded from their communities.  However, the newspaper insisted that abolitionist forces dominated the Republican Party.  On the one hand, the publication accused Republicans of fostering racial equality and equal rights, while on the other, it charged them with hypocrisy for demeaning blacks in their personal lives.  Senator William Henry Seward of New York was presented as two-faced for acting as a conservative constitutionalist in Washington, while arousing abolitionist sentiments on the campaign trail.  As the November election approached, the newspaper printed warnings from Southern newspapers and correspondence that victory for Lincoln would be considered an act of war.