In the fevered atmosphere of 1860, Charleston was the worst possible place for the convention.27 Douglas delegates felt like aliens in a hostile land. Fire-eating orators held forth outdoors each evening. Inside the convention hall, northerners had a three-fifths majority because delegates were apportioned in the same way as electoral votes rather than by party strength. Douglas's supporters were as determined to block a slave-code plank as southerners were to adopt one. There was thus an "irrepressible conflict" in the party, wrote the brilliant young journalist from Cincinnati Murat Halstead, whose reports provide the best account of the convention. "The South will not yield a jot of its position. . . . The Northern Democracy . . . are unwilling to submit themselves to assassination or to commit suicide."28
The crisis came with the report of the platform committee, in which each state had one vote. California and Oregon joined the slave states to provide a majority of 17 to 16 for a slave-code plank similar to the Jefferson Davis resolutions. The minority report reaffirmed the 1856 platform endorsing popular sovereignty and added a pledge to obey a Supreme Court decision on the powers of a territorial legislature. This was not good enough for southerners. They accepted the axiom of the Freeport doctrine that a Court decision would not enforce itself. Slave property needed federal protection, said the committee chairman, a North
26. CG, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., 658.
27. Charleston had been selected as the site by a special Democratic committee chaired by a New Yorker who hoped that the choice of a southern city would promote party harmony!
28. William B. Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860 (Baton Rouge, 1960), 35, 44.
Carolinian, so that when the United States acquired Cuba, Mexico, and Central America any slaveholder could take his property there with perfect security. The foremost orator for southern rights, William Lowndes Yancey, gave a rousing speech in favor of the majority report. The galleries rang with cheers as Yancey launched into his peroration: "We are in a position to ask you to yield," he said to northern delegates. "What right of yours, gentlemen of the North, have we of the South ever invaded? . . . Ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the property that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake."29
After this eloquence the replies of northern delegates sounded futile, indeed almost funereal. "We cannot recede from [popular sovereignty] without personal dishonor," said a Douglas Democrat from Ohio, "never, never, never, so help us God." And they did not. After two days of bitter parliamentary wrangling, Douglas men pushed through their platform by a vote of 165 to 138 (free states 154 to 30, slave states 11 to 108). Fifty delegates from the lower South thereupon walked out. Everything that followed was anticlimax. Douglas could not muster the two-thirds majority required for nomination. Nor could the convention agree on anyone else during fifty-seven acrimonious ballots. Exhausted and heartsick, the delegates adjourned to try again six weeks later in the more hospitable clime of Baltimore. Yancey gave them a ringing farewell. Speaking in Charleston's moonlit courthouse square, he inspired a huge crowd to give three deafening cheers "for an Independent Southern Republic" with his concluding words: "Perhaps even now, the pen of the historian is nibbed to write the story of a new revolution."30
Attempts to reunite the party seemed hopeless. Delegates from the Northwest went home angry toward their southern brethren. "I never heard Abolitionists talk more uncharitably and rancorously of the people of the South than the Douglas men," wrote a reporter. "They say they do not care a d—n where the South goes. . . . 'She may go out of the Convention into hell,' for all they care." But most southern bolters aimed to seek readmission at Baltimore. Their strategy was "to rule or ruin," wrote Alexander Stephens, who had moved toward moderation during the past year and was now supporting Douglas.31 If readmitted, the bolters
29. Speech of William L. Yancey of Alabama, Delivered in the National DemocraticConvention (Charleston, 1860).
30. Nevins, Emergence, II, 215; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), 754; Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln, 86.
31. Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln, 101; Stephens quoted in George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston, 1934), 468.
intended to insist again on a slave-code platform and if defeated to walk out again, this time with the promise of most upper-South delegates to join them. If they were denied admission, the same upper-South delegates would bolt and help their cotton-state compatriots form a new party.
But Douglas's supporters in several lower-South states organized rival delegations to Baltimore. The fate of the Democratic party hung on the credentials fight there. After sober second thoughts about their willingness to let the bolters go to hell, most northern delegates were willing to compromise by seating some of the bolters and some of the challengers. But anti-Douglas southerners wanted all or nothing. They walked out once more, followed by most delegates from the upper South and a handful of proslavery northerners—more than one-third of the total. The bolters quickly organized their own convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (the current vice president) for president on a slave-code platform. The dispirited loyalists nominated Douglas and returned home with renewed bitterness in their hearts toward the rebels who had all but ensured the election of a Black Republican president.32
Republicans helped along that cause by adroit action at their national convention in Chicago. The basic problem confronting the party was the need to carry nearly all of the free states in order to win. Expecting to lose California, Oregon, and perhaps New Jersey, they must capture Pennsylvania and either Indiana or Illinois among the states they had lost in 1856 to achieve an electoral majority. William H. Seward's weakness in these lower-North states formed a growing cloud on the horizon of his anticipated nomination. To carry these states, a Republican had to attract support from many of the Fillmore votes of 1856. Seward's long record of hostility to nativism would undercut this effort. More important, his higher-law and irrepressible-conflict speeches had given him a radical reputation that daunted old Whig conservatives. Despite Seward's repudiation of John Brown and his ideals, some Harper's Ferry mud clung to his coattails. In addition, years of internecine Whig warfare in New York had earned Seward numerous enemies, among
32. Nevins, Emergence, II, 262–72; Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), 309–20; Milton, Eve of Conflict, 450–79; Johannsen, Douglas, 759–73; Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln, 178–278.
them Horace Greeley. A Seward nomination might also rob Republicans of the issue of corruption that scandals in the Buchanan administration had given them the opportunity to exploit. The bad smell of recent franchise grants by the New York legislature that could be traced to Seward's political manager Thurlow Weed tainted his candidate's repute. The rowdy, hard-drinking claque of gallery supporters that the Seward delegation brought to Chicago did nothing to improve the New Yorker's image."33
Coming into the convention with a large lead based on strength in upper-North states, Seward hoped for a first-ballot nomination. But Republicans were sure to win those states no matter whom they nominated. Pragmatists from all regions and politicians from the doubtful states combined in a stop-Seward movement. They had plenty of potential candidates: favorite sons from Vermont and New Jersey, and four men with state or regional backing whose aspirations went beyond favorite-son status: Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Edward Bates of Missouri, and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. But Chase shared Seward's handicap of a radical reputation and did not command unanimous support from even his own state. Cameron's notoriety as a spoilsman who had been in turn a Democrat, a Know-Nothing, and had flirted with Whiggery, militated against his candidacy among delegates concerned that the party should appear to be as pure as Caesar's wife. Bates seemed for a time Seward's strongest challenger because Greeley and the influential Blair family backed him in the hope that he mi
ght carry even a few border states as well as the lower North. But the colorless sixty-seven-year-old Missourian had been a slaveholder, a Know-Nothing, and in 1856 he had supported Fillmore. He therefore alienated too many constituencies whose support was essential—especially German Protestants. The belief that a Republican might carry a border state was fanciful, and Bates wound up with delegate support mainly from marginal states where Republican prospects were bleak or hopeless: Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Oregon.
This left Lincoln. By the time the convention's opening gavel came down on May 16, Lincoln had emerged from a position as the darkest of horses to that of Seward's main rival. Party leaders gradually recognized that the Illinoisian had most of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of an ideal candidate. He was a former antislavery Whig in a
33. Mark W. Summers, " 'A Band of Brigands': Albany Lawmakers and Republican National Politics, 1860," CWH, 30 (1984), 101–19.
party made up mostly of former antislavery Whigs. But despite his house-divided speech, he had a reputation as a moderate. Many former Democrats in the party could not stomach Seward, but they remembered with appreciation Lincoln's gesture in stepping aside to permit the election of antislavery Democrat Lyman Trumbull to the Senate in 1855. Lincoln had opposed the Know Nothings, which would help him with the German vote, but not so conspicuously as to drive away former American voters who would refuse to support Seward. Already known popularly as Honest Abe, Lincoln had a reputation for integrity that compared favorably with the dubious image of Thurlow Weed's New York machine. Of humble origins, Lincoln personified the free-labor ideology of equal opportunity and upward mobility. He had been born in a log cabin. In a stroke of political genius, one of Lincoln's managers exhibited at the Illinois state convention a pair of weatherbeaten fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split thirty years earlier. From then on, Lincoln the railsplitter became the symbol of frontier, farm, opportunity, hard work, rags to riches, and other components of the American dream embodied in the Republican self-image. Finally, Lincoln was from a state and region crucial to Republican chances, particularly if Douglas as expected became the nominee of northern Democrats. Except for William Henry Harrison, who died after a month in office, no president had been elected from the Old Northwest. The fastest-growing part of the country, this region believed that its turn had come. The selection of Chicago as the convention site incalculably strengthened Lincoln's candidacy. Huge, enthusiastic crowds composed mostly of Illinoisians turned up at the large hall built for the convention and nicknamed the "wigwam." Counterfeit tickets enabled thousands of leather-lunged Lincoln men to pack the galleries.
Lincoln was not an unknown factor in national politics before 1860. His contest with Douglas had won wide attention; the publication of the debates early in 1860 enhanced his reputation. In 1859 Lincoln had given political speeches in a half-dozen midwestern states. In February 1860 he addressed a large audience in New York's Cooper Institute and went on to New England where he gave eleven speeches. This first appearance of Lincoln in the Northeast was a triumph, enabling his supporters back in Illinois to crow that "no man has ever before risen so rapidly to political eminence in the United States."34 Partly on the
34. William E. Baringer, Lincoln's Rise to Power (Boston, 1937), 41 for quotation, and chaps. 1–4 for the emergence of Lincoln as Seward's main rival.
basis of these speeches Lincoln picked up delegate support in New England, winning nineteen votes from this Seward stronghold on the first ballot at Chicago.
Yet so obscure was Lincoln in certain circles before his nomination that some pundits had not included his name on their lists of seven or a dozen or even twenty-one potential candidates. Several newspapers spelled his first name Abram. But not for long. The turning point came when Indiana decided to join Illinois to give Lincoln solid first-ballot support from two of the most important lower-North states. This gave Lincoln's managers, a little known but brilliant group of Illinoisians, the chance to win a pledge from Pennsylvania to cast most of its second-ballot votes for Lincoln after the first-ballot gesture to Cameron. All through the feverish night of May 17–18 the Illinois politicos worked to line up other scattered second-ballot support for Lincoln. Despite the latter's injunction from Springfield to "make no contracts that will bind me," his lieutenants in Chicago probably promised cabinet posts and other patronage plums to Indianians, to Cameron of Pennsylvania, and perhaps to the Blairs of Maryland and Missouri. How important these pledges were in winning votes is debatable—after all, Weed could make similar promises on Seward's behalf. The belief that Lincoln could carry the lower North and Seward could not was the most powerful Lincoln weapon. And delegates from other states were influenced by the action of Indiana and Pennsylvania because they knew that the party must capture them to win.35
The first ballot revealed Seward's weakness and Lincoln's surprising strength. With 233 votes needed to nominate, Seward fell sixty short at 173½ while Lincoln polled 102. The direction of the wind became
35. For Lincoln's injunction, see CWL, IV, 50. Historians have long debated whether Lincoln's lieutenants pledged cabinet posts to Cameron and others. Evidence for such commitments is mostly second-hand or circumstantial. For an argument that binding pledges played a vital role, see Barringer, Lincoln's Rise, 214, 266–67, 277,334; for an opposing argument that no binding deals were made, see Willard L. King, Lincoln's Manager: David Davis (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 137–38, 141, 162–64. For an assertion that pledges were made but were only one of several factors in securing Indiana and Pennsylvania for Lincoln, see Ncvins, Emergence, II, 256–57. For a balanced judgment that even if pledges were made they were less important than the conviction that Seward could not carry the lower North, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's (Stanford, 1962), 159. Whether or not there were any firm promises, there does seem to have been an "understanding" that Cameron and Caleb Smith of Indiana would get cabinet posts—and so they did.
clear on the second ballot as Seward gained fewer than a dozen votes while Vermont, Pennsylvania, and scattered votes from other states including some of Ohio's switched to Lincoln, bringing him almost even with Seward at 181 votes. During these ballots the wigwam was electric with an excitement unprecedented in American politics. Ten thousand spectators, most of them for Lincoln, jammed the galleries and made so much noise that a reporter exhausted his store of similes to describe it: "Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, a score of big steam whistles going. . . . A herd of buffaloes or lions could not have made a more tremendous roaring." The crowd communicated a palpable impulse to delegates, reinforcing the dramatic growth of Lincoln's second-ballot total to convey an impression of irresistible momentum. As the third ballot began, suspense stretched nerves almost to the breaking point. Six more New England votes switched to Lincoln, along with eight from New Jersey, nine from Maryland, four more from his native Kentucky. When another fifteen Chase votes from Ohio went to Lincoln, the rafters literally shook with reverberation. Scores of pencils added the total before the clerk announced it: Lincoln had 231½ votes. Amid a sudden silence the Ohio chairman leaped onto his chair and announced the change of four more votes to Lincoln. With this "there was the rush of a great wind in the van of a storm—and in another breath, the storm was there . . . thousands cheering with the energy of insanity."36
None of the forty thousand people in and around the wigwam ever forgot that moment. All except the diehard Seward delegates were convinced that they had selected the strongest candidate. Few could know that they had also chosen the best man for the grim task that lay ahead. To balance the ticket the convention nominated for vice president Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, a former Democrat and one of Lincoln's earliest supporters in New England but also a friend of Seward. The Republican platform was one of the most effective documents of its kind in American history. While abating none of the antislavery convictions expressed in the 1856 platform, it sof
tened the language slightly and denounced John Brown's raid as "the gravest of crimes." Gladly accepting the issues handed to Republicans by the opposition, the platform pledged support for a homestead act, rivers and harbors improvements, and federal aid for construction of a transcontinental railroad. For Pennsylvania, and for the Whiggish elements of the party in general,
36. Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln, 165, 158, 171.
the platform contained a tariff plank that called for an "adjustment" of rates "to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country" and "secure to the workingmen liberal wages." Another plank tilted the party away from nativism by declaring opposition to "any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens . . . from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired." To southern disunionists the platform issued a warning against "contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence."37
III
The excitement and optimism at Chicago carried over into the Republican campaign. This young party exuded the ebullience of youth. First-time voters flocked to the Republican standard. Thousands of them enrolled in "Wide-Awake" clubs and marched in huge parades carrying torches mounted on the ubiquitous fence rails that became a symbol of this campaign. Political songbooks rolled off the presses, and party faithful sang their theme song, "Ain't you glad you joined the Republicans?"
One advantage the Republicans enjoyed over their opponents was party unity. The disappointed Sewardites followed their leader's example and stumped with enthusiasm for Lincoln. Only a handful of abolitionists on the left and a rather larger number of Whig-Americans on the right showed signs of alienation. The latter represented the main obstacle to Republican hopes of sweeping the North. Like the mythical phoenix, the Whig party kept rising from its own ashes. In 1860 it did so in the guise of the Constitutional Union party, which had held its convention a week before the Republicans. These conservatives decided that the best way to avoid the calamity of disunion was to take no stand at all on the issues that divided North and South. Instead of a platform, therefore, they adopted a pious resolution pledging "to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution . . . the Union . . . and the Enforcement of the Laws." The convention nominated wealthy slaveholder John Bell of Tennessee for president and venerable Cotton Whig Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president. Few delegates were under sixty years of age; this "Old Gentlemen's Party" became a butt of gentle ridicule by Republicans, who described the Bell-Everett ticket as
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