The trip east was a big deal for Lincoln. He bought a new suit; he visited Mathew Brady’s photographic studio to take a serious portrait; and he labored over his Plymouth speech more than he had over any other address—a labor he performed twice over as the venue for his presentation changed from Beecher’s church to the decidedly more political forum of the Cooper Union in Manhattan. Greeley wanted a broader platform for his new western star.
Lincoln did not disappoint his eastern promoters. More than fifteen hundred people braved a driving snowstorm to listen to this strange-looking and -sounding westerner. Maybe the surprise of hearing eloquence emanating from such an ungainly form with a voice to match accounted for the enthusiasm, but there was no gainsaying that the western star had become an eastern phenomenon. The reviews gushed unstinting praise. Greeley’s Tribune exclaimed, “He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.” Major Republican organs around the country picked up the speech and published it as a pamphlet, and venues throughout the Northeast clamored for Lincoln to speak.19
Lincoln did not expound any new ideas in his Cooper Union speech. But he had a knack throughout his political career of articulating what his audience was thinking with such eloquence that it appeared as a proclamation from the gods. He elevated not only his sentiments but also his listeners, imparting an importance to their mutual journey to a greater end. In February 1860, the nation wondered about the insurgent Republican Party, a sectional organization hostile to the South and, therefore, a threat to the integrity of the Union. John Brown’s ascension to martyrdom, supported by select Republicans, damaged the party’s profile in the North. Several southern leaders stated flatly that a Republican victory in the upcoming presidential election would end the Union. The front-runner for the Republican nomination, William H. Seward, concerned northerners with his confrontational rhetoric—the appeal to a “higher law,” and the “irrepressible conflict” that he foresaw.
Two months earlier, just a few weeks after John Brown’s execution, a Unionist rally drew a crowd of ten thousand to lower Manhattan in bitter weather. Five thousand of these citizens squeezed into the Academy of Music to hear patriotic speeches. Banners festooned the hall bearing famous Unionist quotes headed by George Washington’s declaration, “Indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” A thirty-two-gun salute punctuated the orations. New York brooked no patience with those who agitated the slavery question. Should the Republicans pull back to a position of conciliation and compromise?20
Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech offered a resounding “no” and revived Republican morale by emphasizing the party’s basic reason for existence: its political and moral opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories. Neither bullied by southern threats of disunion nor discouraged by the weakening of northern resolve, Lincoln refocused the attention on the party’s primary objective, a position he believed appealed to a broad cross-section of northerners and threatened no malice to the South or to slavery where it currently existed. “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” Lincoln counseled his audience. The Republican Party would not attack slavery where it existed but would “stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively” to prevent its extension. He concluded with a stirring call to carry forward the party’s first principles with pride and purpose: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” It was a classic Lincoln speech, steeped in morality and moderation, strong but not aggressive.21
The new voice from the West warmed to the reception. Lincoln allowed himself to entertain thoughts of the presidency. “The taste is in my mouth a little,” he admitted. By the time the Republicans convened in Chicago in May 1860 to nominate their presidential candidate, Lincoln was not a long shot for the prize. He was almost everyone’s second choice—acceptable as an alternative to the Seward men, to the supporters of Senator Salmon P. Chase, and to those who favored conservative former Whig Edward Bates of Missouri. He was, in effect, the least objectionable man at the convention. If any of the other candidates faltered, Lincoln would be the logical beneficiary.22
Lincoln also benefited from the location of the convention in his home state of Illinois. His reputation as the most moderate of the candidates, save for the colorless Bates, impressed delegates convinced that only a moderate nominee had a chance to carry the states of the lower North. The Republicans could win the presidency without the South, but they needed Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana if they wanted to achieve that victory. Lincoln, more than Seward, could appeal to conservative former Whigs in these states.
Lincoln’s campaign managers deftly portrayed the Illinois lawyer as a Republican Andrew Jackson, a man born in a log cabin who enjoyed splitting rails and plowing dirt, though in truth he abhorred any serious labor connected with rural life. The image harked back to the successful “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” Whig campaign of 1840, an association the Republicans hoped to cultivate among former Whigs. Lincoln was now the “Rail Splitter,” as Andrew Jackson was “Old Hickory,” a rough-hewn westerner, a striking evocation of the incorruptible and indomitable common man. What better individual to lead the nation out of sin and toward redemption than someone fresh out of the West, America’s dream region.
The platform that Lincoln would run on—and party faithful paid much more attention to the specifics of these documents than we do today—expressed this promise. Although the Republicans did not abandon their strong opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories, they did not duplicate the defiant tone of the 1856 party platform that contained a specific denunciation of the Slave Power. The platform was a western document offering homesteads on the frontier, federal aid to improve rivers and harbors, and a slight increase in the tariff to stimulate the region’s industrial base and appeal also to the older manufacturing districts of the East. The platform avoided offending immigrants, despite the party’s vigorous Know Nothing contingent, calling for “full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”23
The revival-like unity of the Republicans reflected a growing confidence in the party’s prospects, especially given the disarray of the Democratic Party after its nominating convention in Charleston, South Carolina, a few weeks earlier. A worse venue for a party that desperately needed to come together could not have been imagined. The idea was that if the Democrats could come out of this southern nationalist stronghold as a unified party, the most difficult part of the campaign would be behind them. But from the outset, Charleston proved an unfortunate choice. The city lacked the hotel space to accommodate the crush of delegates, and the oppressive April heat rendered the packed hall a cauldron of quick tempers and short wits. Southern delegates competed with each other as to who could elicit the most raucous cheers from the packed partisan galleries. If those delegates had followed through on their threats, the Democratic Party would have declared war on the United States by the midpoint of the convention. Incendiary rhetoric left the Democratic Party in ashes.
Southern delegates were much more intent on making a point than on nominating a presidential candidate. The posturing that southerners had exhibited in the current congressional session carried over into the convention’s deliberations. When the platform committee called for a federal slave code in the territories, northern Democrats, in the majority, defeated the proposal, prompting a walkout by delegates from Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, thus depriving the likely nominee, Stephen A. Douglas, of the required two-thirds majority. The convention voted to reconvene in Baltimore in June.
The political landscape had darkened for the Democrats by June. The Republicans were already fanning o
ut over the North to spread their gospel of progress, prosperity, and national union. Rival delegations from the Lower South states arrived in Baltimore, one side pledged to Douglas and the other to obstruction. When the convention voted for the Douglas delegations, the spurned delegates walked out, this time joined by colleagues from the Upper South. The remaining delegates nominated Douglas for president and Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia—one of the few southerners remaining in the hall—for vice president. Southern delegates convened to nominate sitting vice president John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential candidate and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon as vice president. The breakup of the last national party was complete.
Alexander Stephens, who stood with Douglas to the last, despaired, not only for his party but for his country: “There is a tendency everywhere, not only at the North, but at the South, to strife, dissension, disorder, and anarchy.” The chaos that his friend Abraham Lincoln had warned against two decades earlier now seemed imminent. The southern bolters achieved their objectives: they denied Douglas the nomination of a unified party, and they crafted a platform brimming with a “full measure of Southern rights.” Yet, by fracturing the Democratic Party, the southern delegates rendered it more likely that a party hostile to those rights would assume power. Perhaps that was their intention.24
A month before the Democratic Party reconvened to die, a group of former Whigs, mainly from northern and southern border states, gathered in Baltimore as the Constitutional Union Party and selected John Bell of Tennessee as its presidential candidate, with Edward Everett of Massachusetts as his running mate. The party platform was simple: for the Constitution and for the Union.
With four presidential candidates in the field, the 1860 presidential campaign unfolded in three distinct campaigns: Douglas against Lincoln in the North; Breckinridge versus Bell in the South; and Douglas contesting Bell in the border states, with Lincoln and Breckinridge hoping for some support there as well.
The Republicans left Chicago with the campaign initiative that they never relinquished. They used their congressional investigations into the corruption of the Buchanan administration—the first such hearings in the nation’s history—and the southern Democratic obstruction of their programs to aid workers and farmers with land in the West, and the homespun nature of their presidential candidate to broaden the party’s appeal in the key border states of the North.
Republican rallies exuded an evangelical fervor that blended religious and military pageantry much in the manner of the Free Soil Party, though on a grander scale. They performed before a more receptive audience, as anti-slavery and, especially anti-southern sentiment had grown in the North since 1848. The “Wide-Awakes,” the party’s shock troops of younger voters, four hundred thousand strong by one estimate, paraded in black oilcloth capes and red shirts after the fashion of the Paris revolutionaries of 1848. Even into the Democratic stronghold of New York City they marched, holding their torches high through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan preceded by booming military bands, and cheered on by thousands of partisan onlookers who sang out the “Freedom Battle Hymn,” entreating citizens to march “On for freedom, God, our country, and the right.” The rally culminated at Broadway and Tenth Street at midnight in a shower of Roman candles. Wherever the Wide-Awakes went during that campaign season, their parades and the accompanying din of music and fireworks lent an impression of an inexorable tide changing the political landscape of America for all time. Here was not merely a political rally; here was a movement.25
Wide-Awakes marching through lower Manhattan, October 3, 1860. Though not a paramilitary organization, the Wide-Awakes wore uniforms and marched in precision order through northern streets supporting the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, lending a martial atmosphere to Republican rallies during the 1860 election campaign. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The Republicans flaunted their youthful exuberance and their righteousness. Morality was a major theme at these events, conveniently bundling the issues of slavery, Roman Catholicism, prohibition, and political corruption. Wide-Awakes were fond of chanting the doggerel “Little Doug [liked] lots of drink in his jug,” while portraying Lincoln as a paragon of virtue—abstemious in alcohol, tobacco, and swearing—that was at least two-thirds accurate. Lincoln, moreover, was “religiously honest.” “Honest Abe” would restore probity and purity to the White House. Not a politician but a statesman, a man who had only a brief stay in Washington before returning to toil humbly for his people.26
Despite the Republican Party platform’s silence on religion and Lincoln’s rejection of nativism, former Know Nothings grasped the evangelical fervor of the campaign to pursue their attacks on the Catholic Church. One Republican newspaper, blending anti-slavery and nativist rhetoric, alleged that “Roman Catholics, whose consciences are enslaved … regard the King of Rome—the Pope—as the depository of all authority.” Another editor forged the same connection, charging that Irish Catholics “were sots and bums who crawled out of their ‘rotten nests of filth’ on elections to cast ignorant ballots for the candidates of the slaveocracy.” Republicans distilled the Democrats to an unholy trinity of “the Pope, a whisky barrel, and a nigger driver.” Little wonder that Catholics responded to this barrage by voting in unprecedented numbers for Democratic candidates. The nativist calculation that linking Catholics and slaveholders would attract rather than repel voters in key northern states proved correct, however. The Republicans’ support of nativist policies in northern cities proved more compelling to some voters than the slavery issue.27
Stephen A. Douglas had no army drilling for him, though several northern cities managed spirited rallies for the Little Giant. Reviled by a substantial wing of his own party, Douglas took to the hustings, an unprecedented move for a major presidential candidate of that era. He crisscrossed the North and a good portion of the South, including a speaking tour in Georgia at the invitation of Alexander Stephens. He promoted popular sovereignty, exalted the Union, and warned against extremism.
In the South, the surrogates for Breckinridge and Bell carried on mannerly campaigns, with the former stressing the importance of protecting southern rights though not threatening disunion, and the latter hewing closely to the name of the party. Breckinridge’s strong professions for the Union undercut Douglas’s strategy to command the center position between anti-slavery and disunion. While there was plenty of disunion talk in the South, none of it came from Breckinridge.
The southern press and politicians devoted considerable space to these candidacies and, in the Upper South, to Douglas as well. They also reserved a good many column inches for a candidate whose name and party would not even appear on the ballots in ten southern states. A relative unknown in the South at the outset of the campaign—one Alabama newspaper referred to him as Gabriel Lincoln—he came to be known by many southerners as a subhuman creature whose political party existed primarily to destroy the South. The Republican candidate, according to one description, was a “horrid-looking wretch … sooty and scoundrelly in aspect; a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper, and the nightman.”28
As “sooty” implied, southern journalists and politicians employed race to denigrate the Republicans. One editor claimed falsely that Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, “had negro blood in his veins and … one of his children had kinky hair.” It was clear that the party stood for “one dogma—the equality of races, white and black.” The amount of ink and rhetoric marshaled to excoriate Lincoln and the Republicans far exceeded their scant prospects for electoral success in the South. Rather, it seemed as if southern nationalists wished to educate the voters less about the election than about its aftermath should the Republicans win.29
Lincoln’s frequent professions that Republicans bore no ill will toward the South or its institutions struck many in the South as disingenuous. After all, who would appoint the postmasters, the judges, and the customs agents, and who would control the military in a Republican adm
inistration? Southerners predicted a Republican administration’s policies could wipe out “four hundred and thirty millions of dollars” of capital investment in slaves. “They know that they can plunder and pillage the South, as long as they are in the same Union with us, by … every other possible mode of injustice and peculation. They know that in the Union they can steal southern property in slaves.” While Lincoln and Douglas sparred as to who best would promote the progress and prosperity of the nation, southerners viewed the election as a referendum on themselves—whether other parts of the Union valued their comity sufficiently to reject the Republican Party and accede to southern demands for protection.30
Lincoln did not say much during the campaign. “My published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say.” He did change his appearance, a source of constant comment by both his supporters and detractors. Several colleagues told him that he “would be much improved in appearance” if he cultivated “whiskers.” When eleven-year-old Grace Bedell suggested during a campaign appearance that “you would look a great deal better” if he grew a beard, “for your face is so thin,” he finally gave in and allowed hair to sprout and soften his sunken cheekbones.31
Alexander Stephens watched the campaign unfold from his Georgia residence and felt a rising sadness. The slanders against Lincoln pained him especially. Stephens believed that a Lincoln administration would run the government “just as safely for the South and honest and faithfully in every particular” as Buchanan had. “I know the man well,” he emphasized. “He is not a bad man.” Stephens feared the growing influence of disunionists in the South more than he feared the Republicans. If the future of slavery depended on conservative policies and leaders, then southern extremists played into the enemies’ hands. Stephens stumped loyally for Douglas. He respected Breckinridge but worried about some of his supporters, noting that “those who begin revolutions seldom end them.” By the fall, the extremists seemed ascendant. Stephens confided to a correspondent of the New York Herald, “I hold revolution and civil war to be inevitable. The demagogues have raised a whirlwind they cannot control.”32
America Aflame Page 24
