Other relevant party business took up the first two days. When the floor was opened to nominations on the third day, Abe was nominated and seconded, along with Mr. Seward, Mr. Chase, and several other worthy gentlemen.
Then the voting began.
Knowing that Mary was likely to be nervous and excitable throughout what was expected to be a long day with multiple rounds of balloting, her sisters took turns keeping her company. Frances was home with the children when word of the first ballot came through: Seward 1731/2, Lincoln 102, Cameron 501/2, Chase 49, Bates 48, McLean 12, Collamer 10, Wade 3, Sumner 1, Fremont 1.
“Uncle Abe is second only to Mr. Seward,” Mary Jane marveled, shaking her head prettily. “All those important men, and he beat them all.”
“Loyalties will shift now,” Frances explained. “If defeat seems inevitable, a candidate’s supporters may vote for someone else in the next round.”
Later, it was Ninian who came by with news of the second ballot: Seward 1841/2, Lincoln 181, Chase 421/2, Bates 35, Dayton 10, McLean 8, Cameron 2, Clay 2. “Abe gained ground, but so did Seward,” Ninian remarked.
“Yes, but observe how much Abe narrowed the gap,” Frances exclaimed. “He may overtake Seward yet.”
“The third round will decide it,” said Ninian. “The other nominees are too far behind. Their supporters will surely choose between the two leaders with their next ballot. The question remains, which of them will reach 231 votes first, Abe or Seward?”
Soon thereafter, Frances went to Mary’s house to attend her until word of the final balloting arrived. Frances found her sister alone, except for the children and servants, for Abe had spent the day in the telegraph office awaiting news and election returns. The hour grew quite late. They chatted and kept their hands busy with sewing or knitting until their eyes grew tired from the strain of working by lamplight. The children were put to bed, the house grew silent, but in the lovely sitting room of the Lincoln home, Mary and Frances were wide awake, listening for the sound of Abe’s arrival and trying not to watch the clock.
It was nearly nine o’clock when Mary sat up in her chair, suddenly alert. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
Frances listened carefully until a faint melody drifted to her ear. “Music?”
Pressing a hand to her heart, Mary nodded and bolted to her feet. Frances followed her to the front entry, where her sister paced back and forth, wringing her hands and smiling tremulously, until they heard Abe’s distinct tread on the front porch.
Mary flung open the door, and there stood her husband, eyes beaming, a faint, melancholic smile on his face. “I told the fellows waiting outside the telegraph office that there was a little woman at home who was probably more interested in this dispatch than I was.” He held out a telegram.
Mary gasped and snatched it from his hand, and Frances read over her shoulder the results of the third ballot: Lincoln 2311/2, Seward 180, and Chase 241/2, with the remaining few votes distributed sparsely among the others. Then, once Abe had won the majority, all of the delegates immediately switched their votes so the choice would be unanimous.
Abraham Lincoln had won the Republican Party nomination for president of the United States.
As Frances marveled and Mary cried for joy and embraced her husband, the faint music they had heard from afar swelled as an impromptu marching band approached the house, playing jubilant, patriotic tunes. A vast crowd soon gathered, and Abe stepped outside to address them, accepting the honor of their visit, which he assumed was not so much for himself as for the representative of their great party. After a loud burst of applause, Abe thanked them again and remarked, “I would invite you all into the house if I thought it were large enough to hold you.”
“We will give you a larger house on the fourth of next March,” a man called out. The crowd laughed and cheered and clapped.
“As my current home could not contain more than a fraction of you,” Abe continued, “I will merely invite in as many as can find room.”
Immediately a shout went up and there was a rush for the door. Frances and Mary had a moment to exchange a look of panicked dismay before they hastened to welcome the unexpected guests.
By the time the last well-wisher drifted away, it was too late for Frances to return home, so she stayed overnight in the guest room, her head still buzzing from wonder and excitement. The next morning she and Mary slept late. After waking, they chatted happily over a leisurely breakfast—the last leisurely morning her sister was likely to have for a while, Frances supposed. She returned home after breakfast, so she was not present when the official delegation from Chicago arrived to formally inform Abe that the Republican Convention had selected him as their candidate for the presidential election. Soon thereafter, Abe formally accepted.
Republicans across the land reveled, virtually all of Springfield rejoiced, and Frances thought Mary should too. The Todd sisters read in the papers how the delegates in Chicago had celebrated after nominating Abe, how cannons had been fired and nearly thirty thousand people had filled the streets, shouting and cheering, how the Press and Tribune buildings had been illuminated from foundation to rooftop, and how bands had played triumphant marches as Republicans paraded through the streets with fence rails on their shoulders in a nod to Abe’s humble origins.
Soon thereafter, the press shifted its focus to Springfield. Reporters raced to learn more about the Western lawyer who had astounded the country by defeating the presumptive nominee. Mary well understood how important it was that her husband make an excellent impression on the writers who would soon describe him for millions of curious and skeptical readers. Treating them as honored guests, Mary graciously entertained the journalists who crossed their threshold, making them comfortable in her beautifully decorated home, offering them delicious food and drink, impressing them with her grace, knowledge, and charm, and quickly dispelling the notion that the Lincolns were country bumpkins. Most of the subsequent articles praised her lovely manners and stylish appearance, but one earned her eternal enmity by describing her as “squatty,” and a few others indignantly noted that she was too free with her opinions and had an “unwomanly” interest in politics.
Others who descended on Springfield to meet their nominee included politicians, party leaders, and other prominent Republicans who held no official office but were respected for their ability to make or break a candidate. Despite the publicity of the Lincoln-Douglas debates two years before, Abe remained a stranger to a vast number of men he urgently needed to vote for him. He was so little known even within his own party that after the convention there had been some confusion within the Republican press about whether his given name was Abraham or Abram.
Most of these political men requested a private meeting with Abe and came away impressed with his intelligence and astute grasp of the rising tensions between the North and South, as well as the dwindling number of options to resolve the conflict peacefully. Dozens more came to introduce themselves and to pledge their loyalty, some out of a sincere belief that he was the best man to bear the standard of the Republican Party, others in the hope of receiving a patronage position after he took office. The majority left Springfield with a favorable opinion of the candidate and his wife, but some looked askance when Mary listed her ideal choices for cabinet positions or queried leaders about campaign strategy. Their pointed looks conveyed as emphatically as words that her role was to be the devoted, selfless angel of her husband’s household, not his political adviser.
Frances was aware that Mary was working tirelessly to support Abe by winning over the press and the Republican establishment. This was the role Mary had prepared for all her life, and she embraced it with great enthusiasm. But in the weeks following the convention, Mary’s great endeavor receded into the background for Frances as other concerns occupied her thoughts. Ann’s ten-year-old son Lincoln had fallen ill from typhoid, and for many long days he suffered from burning fevers, headaches, lethargy, and terrible stomach pains. William attended him
several times a day, examining him carefully and offering him the best remedies known to medical science. Frances did all she could to assist her husband, while Elizabeth visited daily to take Ann’s place at Lincoln’s bedside so she could steal a few hours of sleep. When the boy’s symptoms precipitously worsened, Elizabeth moved into the Smiths’ guest room and managed the household so her sister could devote herself to nursing her son. But despite their vigilant care and William’s renowned skill, Lincoln grew weaker day by day. On June 12, he died as his weeping parents clasped his hands and prayed until all hope was lost.
Frances knew that nothing she could say would ease her devastated sister’s pain. What else could she do but embrace Ann and let her weep in her arms until exhaustion overcame her and she was able to sleep?
Mary, who knew too well how Ann suffered, came by every day to sit with her when Ann could do no more than recline in a darkened room and grieve. On better days, if Ann responded to her coaxing, Mary escorted her on slow, quiet walks in the sunshine to keep up her strength. Elizabeth and Julia looked after the household and the younger children, while William and Frances saw to the funeral arrangements. Even Abe’s crucial political activities came to an abrupt halt while the family mourned.
On the day of the burial, Frances sought comfort in the words of scripture the minister intoned, and she tried to take heart from observing how the family had come together to show their deep and abiding love and support for the grieving parents. But as the small coffin was lowered into the ground, a strange, grim premonition came over her that one day all of Springfield would be clad in mourning black and the Todd sisters would grieve anew—not together, but separated by immeasurable distances.
The presidential race would not pause for the family’s mourning. In keeping with established custom, Abe did not campaign for himself. Instead, other prominent Republicans stumped for him—Charles Sumner and Cassius Clay, as well as his erstwhile rivals for the nomination, Salmon Chase, Frank P. Blair, and William Seward. Restrained from using his most powerful means of persuasion—his own extraordinary oratorical skills—Abe knew he needed help if he was to win the national election.
Some help came to him from an unlikely quarter—the Democratic Party. Their national convention in Charleston had ended in shambles in April, when outraged Southern delegates had walked out after a heated dispute over the party’s official platform regarding slavery. When the Democrats officially reconvened in Baltimore on June 18, the disgruntled delegates’ states had replaced them with more cooperative men. To no one’s surprise, Mr. Douglas was chosen as the party’s nominee. Five days later, the excluded Southern delegates defiantly held their own convention elsewhere in the city and nominated former congressman and current vice president John C. Breckinridge, a Kentuckian who adamantly insisted that the Constitution permitted slavery throughout the states and new territories. Further crowding the slate of presidential candidates was Mr. John Bell of Tennessee, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, an alliance of conservative Know-Nothings and Whigs whose simple platform suggested that their approach to the slavery question was to ignore it altogether. With the Democrats splintered, the outlook for a Republican victory in November seemed promising, but Ninian, who had remained a Democrat even though switching parties in 1851 had failed to win him a seat in Congress, held out hope for the Democrats. He believed that the battle for electoral votes would break along geographic lines, with Abe battling Mr. Douglas for the Northern states and Mr. Breckinridge and Mr. Bell splitting those in the South. “Douglas has trounced Abe before,” Ninian said, more cheerfully than Frances thought polite. “The Republicans should take nothing for granted.”
Even with the Democrats splintering into factions, Frances and Elizabeth privately agreed that Abe had his work cut out for him. According to the press, news of his nomination had met with incredulity in Washington, and Democratic newspapers gleefully ridiculed his humble origins, calling him a “third-rate Western lawyer” and a “fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar” and whose illiterate speeches were “interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes”—a claim that anyone who had ever heard him speak would recognize as patently untrue. Not surprisingly, the Southern press provided the most blistering vitriol, mocking not only Abe’s intellect, which they wrongly assumed to be quite insignificant, but also his appearance. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame,” the Houston Telegraph declared with fascinated horror. “He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.” Remarking upon Abe’s image in Harper’s Weekly, the Charleston Mercury proclaimed, “A horrid looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man, a creature fit evidently for petty treason, small stratagems, and all sorts of spoils.” Elizabeth knew Mary took great offense at such depictions, and she too found the lurid prose utterly unfair. Abe might not be what most people would consider handsome, but he was not the grotesquerie depicted in the papers either. And what did his looks have to do with his ability to govern?
Unfortunately, petty mockery of Abe’s appearance proved to be one of the more benign aspects of press coverage in the South. Editorials in papers in nearly every Southern city warned of the dreadful consequences that would befall the nation if he were elected, not the mere policy disputes of bygone days, but violent confrontations in the halls of government and cataclysmic upheaval in Southern towns and homes. Although Frances could not prove it, she was sure the fearmongering in the press was what inspired the malicious, cowardly death threats that began arriving at Abe’s law office and the Lincoln family home. Her heart went out to poor Mary, who daily swung between elation and terror, depending upon the papers and the post.
As November approached, the results of early fall elections boded well for Abe, with sweeping Republican victories in local and state elections in Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Then, at long last and yet before Frances felt quite prepared for it, election day arrived. The morning dawned lovely and clear, and to Frances the crisp autumn air seemed to hum with tension and expectation. Mary had told her sisters that Abe planned to spend the day with his friends and supporters in a room reserved for him at the statehouse, and that the first returns were not expected until after seven o’clock in the evening. Knowing that Mary would fret and worry at home alone with only the children for company, Frances and Elizabeth promised to join her there after supper and to remain with her until the end.
Not long after they settled down in Mary’s sitting room, preparing themselves for a long, anxious wait, a messenger boy arrived with word from Abe, who had left the raucous statehouse for the telegraph office to await the national returns in relative quiet. He had won the New England states and Pennsylvania, the boy reported; a few hours later, he returned to announce that Abe had won the Northwest and Indiana. He had not taken a single Southern state, nor was he likely to, for several had left his name off the ballot altogether.
Frances silently tallied the electoral votes, and when her eyes met Mary’s, she knew they had been struck by the same dreadful thought: Abe must win New York, for without the state’s precious thirty-five electoral votes, he would fall seven short of a majority.
The hours passed slowly, fatigue and tension draining them of the desire to chat. Then, around two o’clock in the morning, the sisters heard a brass band approaching, heedless of the late hour and slumbering neighbors likely to be startled awake by the rousing, cheerful march.
It was then the sisters knew that Abe had taken New York, and therefore the entire election.
Soon thereafter, the front door opened and Abe strolled in. Hurrying to meet him, Mary threw herself into his arms in a passion of tears. “Why, Mary,” said Abe, patting her shoulder and smiling over her head at Frances and Elizabeth, “I thought you wanted me to be president.”
“I do,” said Mary, smiling up through
her tears, “and I am very happy—that is why I am crying.”
As she and Elizabeth congratulated Abe and bade the couple good-night, Frances thought that, despite his smile, her brother-in-law seemed as somber as she had ever seen him.
From the moment dawn broke, Springfield was filled with celebration—marching bands, impromptu parades, speeches at the statehouse. Frances joined in some of the festivities, but for the most part she spent the day at home, overjoyed for Mary and Abe but exhausted from excitement and dazed from the sudden release of tension. The next morning, feeling better rested, she called on Mary to find her sister shaken and drawn, her abundant joy of the previous few days utterly gone. “What’s wrong?” Frances asked, placing her hands on her sister’s shoulders and looking her over. “Are you ill? Should I fetch William? Have you received bad news?”
Mary tried to smile, but grimaced instead. “You will think it’s all nonsense.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Mary sighed and led her to the sitting room. “Last night, Abe lay down to rest on the lounge in his office.” She seated herself on the sofa and, with a gesture, invited Frances to sit beside her. “He saw his image reflected in the mirror, but with two faces, one much paler than the other. The sight unsettled him, and he told me so.”
“It was a trick of the light, or a badly formed mirror. What is so upsetting about that?”
“I think it was a vision,” said Mary. “A prophetic sign that he will be elected twice, but will not live out his second term.”
“Oh, Mary.” Frances reached out to clasp Mary’s hand, cold and trembling, in both of her own. “It is no such thing. Abe was tired. He glimpsed himself in the mirror from an odd angle. You’re giving it too much meaning.”
“I’ve had prophetic visions before.”
“This isn’t one of them,” said Frances firmly. “This wasn’t even your vision, but Abe’s. Why spoil this triumphant moment with false fears? Don’t you have enough to worry about, what with preparing to move to Washington and become mistress of the White House?”
Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters Page 17
