by Alan Sewell
“Welcome to Cleveland, Mr. Lincoln!” said the doorman as he entered the hotel. “Hope our weather hasn’t got the best of you. I think you’ll find the Weddell House warm and comfortable, and I hope conducive to your business.” Lincoln walked to the registration desk, still scuffing his shoes to knock off the last splotches of snow The doorman directed the porter to take his bags. “Too bad about the election,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll do better in ’64.”
Lincoln brightened. “Oh, yes, Ohio did come through for us, and I thank you for that.” When he finished signing the registration he added, “You are right that we have every reason to be optimistic. The way our Republican constituencies are growing we will surely prevail sooner rather than later.”
A fashionably dressed middle-aged fellow standing near the door recognized him. “We surely will, Mr. Lincoln,” the man said enthusiastically. “We’ll elect you President next time, you can count on that! You just wait until the people discover what Douglas and Davis are up to!”
Lincoln shook the man’s hand. “You just wait until Douglas and Davis discover what each other are up to!”
The man guffawed. “Yes, indeed, what a pair we’ve elected! They’re liable to kill each other before you run again. I’m Jim Goodhue, by the way. I publish The Minnesota Pioneer in St. Paul. I do hope we’ll see you on the ticket again in ’64. We need to put an end to this slavery nonsense before it poisons the whole country.”
“All the way from Minnesota?” exclaimed Lincoln. “Then we must give you a productive convention that will justify your travel! If we put our house in order now we will indeed march forward in the next elections.” He smiled. His voters seemed not at all angry with him for failing by the narrowest of margins to carry the Republican Party into the White House. They might well be inclined to give him another chance in ’64. Parties didn’t usually give losing candidates another chance, but who could say? It had been a very close election.
As soon as he reached the registration desk the clerk handed him a sheaf of messages. “A lot of people have been asking for you.”
He was surprised that so many were already here. He had arrived two days early, intending to have a good rest today followed by relaxed socializing tomorrow before getting down to business on Tuesday. He asked, “How many people are you expecting.”
“Over five hundred have booked. Hotel’s full. Manager says that over eight hundred are expected, including those who booked at the hotels across the street.”
“Eight hundred? I’ll be jiggered! I was wondering if anybody other than me would be here.”
The clerk laughed. “The Free State Convention is big news in Ohio. Must be in other states too.”
For a moment he thought about peeping around the corner to see if anyone he knew was in the common area. It was early Sunday morning and few people were up yet, but he did hear a modest buzz of conversation. He listened for a moment to determine whether he could recognize the voices of anyone he knew.
But he was exhausted from the two-day train ride and the disruption of his sleep last night by an unscheduled stop when the locomotive boiler lost pressure. If he became involved in political gossip at this early hour it would go on until late in the evening. He decided it was better to rest now, awaken refreshed, and be ready to talk long into the night. He told the clerk, “If anybody asks for me tell them that I will be down for dinner this evening. Will you please wake me at five?”
As he followed the porter up to his room he reflected on the conversations about the election. He had narrowly lost the two states whose votes were the most closely contested --- Illinois by only 5,400 votes out of 340,000 and Indiana by 2,200 out of 270,000. Illinois was as much Stephen Douglas’ home state as it was his, but even so, losing such a close election in one’s home state hurt.
He wondered again if he should have broken with tradition and campaigned more actively. Douglas had done it, and though the Republicans had mocked him as an uncouth demagogue, he had garnered the votes needed to put Illinois and Indiana in his column, thereby giving him the electoral vote majority. Douglas had bested him by 63% to 37% in the national popular vote, a resounding win, but not unexpected considering that the Republicans had not been allowed to campaign south of the Ohio and Potomac rivers.
Of course the most important factor in the victory was the Douglas/Davis Compact. It had done its job of persuading the majority that the Union could best be maintained by continuing to trust its fortunes to a united Democratic party. Many Northern voters who were moderate on slavery had decided not to force a break with the South by electing a Republican President. Many would surely have switched their vote to Mr. Lincoln if the Democrats had listened to Yancey in Charleston and turned against each other.
Lincoln took encouragement by anticipating events that he believed would work in the Republicans’ favor. The first was that now that Douglas had been elected he would have to govern. No candidate’s popularity on the campaign trail had ever followed him into the White House. Douglas’ strategy of trying to be all things to all people was bound to catch up with him. He chuckled to himself as he imagined Douglas taking fire from front and rear by Yancey’s rump of States Rights Democrats as well as the Republican Free State voters.
Douglas might very well utterly destroy his popularity in trying to thread his way between these two groups, as he had come so close to doing with Popular Sovereignty in the 1850s. If Douglas started marching and counter-marching around in circles he would surely make a fool of himself, enabling the Republicans to be elected in a shoo-in in the next election. He mused that perhaps this defeat was a blessing in disguise. Sometimes losing an election was the best thing that could happen to a candidate and a party, although it rarely seemed so at the time of the loss.
Lincoln also cyphered that the next election would have a more Republican constituency in Illinois and Indiana. These states had been settled first from the south by Kentuckians and Virginians moving north across the Ohio River. These people followed their fathers’ tradition of voting Democratic. Only later, after the completion of the Erie Canal, had enough New Englanders and foreign-born Europeans, primarily Germans, began arriving in the northern counties along the Great Lakes to make the states competitive for Republicans.
Ohio, being a few years ahead of Indiana and Illinois in its settlement, had already acquired a larger Republican constituency. Though it had given the Republicans a scare in the early state election of October, vigorous late campaigning had swung its presidential electors into the Republican column in the national election. And beyond the Mississippi there was fertile ground for new Republican-voting Free States --- Dakota, Colorado, Nevada, Kansas, and Nebraska. His weather-beaten countenance brightened again at the thought that he would surely live to see a Republican President, even if it might be someone other than him.
When he reached the room on the third floor the porter opened the door and set down the bags. He showed Lincoln the room and asked him to call if he required anything else. The porter smiled and said, “Thank, you, sir” when Lincoln tipped him a half-dollar. Lincoln reflected that most porters were Negroes like this fellow. Few white laborers wanted to “demean” themselves by carrying another man’s bags. Negroes did the work cheerfully, earning tips that in fine hotels like this one exceeded the wages paid to Whites who labored in the factories.
Lincoln hoped that the Negroes, at least here in the North, would remain free and unmolested until his party could make a comeback in 1864. The Southern slave owners could be counted on to use the election of Douglas and Davis to their advantage. The Dred Scott Decision combined with a vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law would allow them to scour the Free States for runaway Negroes, perhaps even kidnapping free Negroes and selling them back into slavery.
The Slavers would find plenty of accomplices among the rabid anti-Negro men of the North. Lincoln was embarrassed that the Democratic majority in the Illinois Legislature had recently voted to arrest idle Negroe
s and hire them out as indentured servants, a practice to all intents and purposes equivalent to slavery. These people could be counted on to turn any Negro who annoyed them over to the slave catchers and collect their bounty.
He therefore felt that his party had to walk a tightrope across this Free State Convention. They couldn’t say anything that would make their party appear to be radical and sectional. After all, the New England Federalists had destroyed their party in 1814 by threatening secession at the infamous Hartford Convention. Indeed, if Yancey and his Fire Eaters had had their way in Charleston, the Democrats would have destroyed their party and the recent election results would have been reversed.
On the other hand they had to remain vigilant to guard against the Democrats infecting the entire nation with pro-slavery sentiment. The Democrats had the White House and a majority on the Supreme Court. They dominated the Senate 40 to 26. The Republicans held a narrow majority of 125 to 114 in the House. Their House majority plus the recent innovation in Senate rules known as “The Filibuster” should enable them to quash any pro-slavery legislation that the Democrats tried to ram through Congress.
However, we must take nothing for granted. Douglas and Davis will have no qualms about working around our Republicans in Congress, even if they must bend the Constitution to its breaking point. They will be supported by the Southern Democratic majority on the Supreme Court and by the governors of fifteen Slave States marching in lockstep. They have many friends in the Free States --- including the Democratic governors and legislatures of California, Oregon, Illinois, and Indiana --- who will undercut our unity in opposing them. We, in turn, must make common cause with the moderate Union-loving men of the Upper South who tolerate slavery, but are indifferent to its expansion, especially if it should be attempted by means of unconstitutional war. We must be noisy in keeping our cause alive, but not obnoxious in threating to leave the Union.
Lincoln sat down on his bed and read through the sheaf of messages he had picked up at the desk. There was a note that his closest colleagues from Illinois, including Richard Yates, Senator Lyman Trumbull, Congressmen Owen Lovejoy and Elihu Washburne, and David Davis would be arriving together tomorrow. Other prominent Republican friends including Senator Ben Wade from Ohio and Michigan’s Zach Chandler had already arrived and asked him to call on them. Abolitionists Gerrit Smith, William Garrison, and Frederick Douglass wanted an audience with him at the earliest possible moment. The last message was from his old friend the great Pathfinder John Fremont, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in the prior election of 1856, who was coming in from California.
Again he fought back the temptation to get up and greet his colleagues immediately. The fatigue in his body told him that he was no longer the young man who could ride on horseback all day on the Illinois circuit court, arrive at a country tavern at sundown, talk politics into the wee hours, and then arise the next day for court.
Before taking his rest he pulled open the curtain and looked at the view outside. Through the swirling snow he looked across the broad street and took in the panorama of the city. So this is why people come to Cleveland! The Cuyahoga River opened into a large harbor. A boiler factory and a rolling mill stood next to a lumber yard. This was one of those places on the Great Lakes where iron, lumber, coal, and commerce met. And when that happened Capital and Labor prospered. People of all walks of life flocked to these places. Cleveland, like Chicago, was destined to grow into a large city. It would be the task of this convention to make certain that it, and the other great cities of the North, remained Free State cities, with staunch Republican anti-slavery constituencies.
Our best hope of ending slavery is for the Southern slave owners to observe the prosperity of our free laborers in the North. They will come to understand that slavery has no future and will abolish it on their own. That will not happen in this century, but perhaps in the next. In the meantime we in the Free States must not allow our lamp of freedom to be extinguished by those who seek to educate the people to the idea that slavery is the natural and permanent state of the dark skinned peoples who live among us.
He removed his coat and stretched comfortably on the bed. He smiled to himself as he thought about how far up in life he had come, to be staying in a top shelf hotel where each guest had not only a bed all to himself but also a room. Just a few years ago he had been riding the circuit through dusty prairie towns in Illinois, sharing flea-infested beds with strangers in packed rooms. But how he had loved those days! He had talked legal cases and politics with other itinerant lawyers in those little inns until way past midnight. These big-city hotels had their luxuries, but they would never compare with those boisterous good times he had had with his associates in those crowded little taverns out on the prairies.
He fell asleep reminiscing about political talk around the fireplace in the late hours of a winters’ night back in the mid 1850s when he had been a prairie lawyer instead of a candidate for national office. During his dreams he vividly recalled those happy fire-lit conversations, though perhaps the voices that filtered through his sleep were those of other arriving delegates talking out in the hall.
10
Cass County, Michigan December 11, 1860
Notwithstanding the snowy landscape and the howling wind outside, Eddie Bates felt warm to the depths of his soul. Holding his copy of The North Star Liberator he shouted to his common law wife in the kitchen, “We are going to be free, Emma, really and truly free!”
“You are gettin’ mighty excited for this early in the morning,” Emma answered back. “What do Mr. Fred Douglass and Mr. William Garrison say that’s got you so stirred up?”
“It’s not Mr. Douglass and Mr. Garrison this time. It’s Mr. ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln and Mr. John ‘Pathfinder’ Fremont promising the Negroes will be free. Of course they’s talking about the ones up here in the Free States, not the ones down South.”
“That sounds more like it,” said Emma, bringing in the wood-carved plates and forks. “Sounds like they’s promising to free the Negroes what’s already free and leave the ones that’s slaves alone. Don’t seem like reason enough to get exited to me.”
“They’s more to it than that,” said Eddie, ladling field peas onto his plate. “Fremont says from here on out any Negro makes it across the Ohio River and settles down without getting caught right away is a free man. That means us. We don’t have to worry about the slave catchers no mo’. That’s something, don’t you think?”
“Don’t take it for granted just yet,” Emma replied. “White folks have been known to make promises they didn’t intend to keep. What, exactly, did Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Fremont say?”
Eddie and Emma lived in the limbo common to the residents of the Negro Settlements that straddled the border of Indiana and Michigan from South Bend to Battle Creek and Kalamazoo. Most of the Negroes had lived free for years, but few had legal title to their freedom. Eddie’s family had run away from a Maryland plantation in 1833 when Eddie was 9. Emma had walked out of her owners’ house near Wilmington in the Slave State of Delaware when the master passed away in 1850. A few hours later she was in free Pennsylvania, disappearing anonymously into Philadelphia’s Negro district.
Southern slave catchers were entitled by the Fugitive Slave Act to apprehend Eddie, Emma, and any other Negroes who could not show proof of their title to freedom. The Fugitive Slave Act not only authorized Southern slave catchers to prowl the North looking for “runaway” Negroes, but required all citizens including law enforcement officials to assist the slave catchers in returning Negroes to slavery.
So far the Whites in the Abolitionist communities of southwest Michigan and adjoining St. Joseph County, Indiana had defied the Fugitive Slave Act by protecting their Negro neighbors. Marauding slave catchers had been surrounded by mobs of enraged citizens and told that they would be killed if they ever returned. The threats had been effective. Slave catchers hadn’t been seen in Cass County, Michigan or St. Joseph County, Indiana since the early
1850s.
Even so, Eddie never risked travelling beyond the little area encompassing South Bend and Kalamazoo. Not all Northern Whites were Abolitionists. Many, even in these parts, would cheerfully turn him over to slave catchers because they despised free Negroes and needed the bounty money. Even the protection of his Abolitionist neighbors in Cass County couldn’t be counted on as an absolute guarantee of his safety.
In past years former President Franklin Pierce had threatened to send the national army into the North to subdue the Abolitionists and capture the Negroes they protected. Pierce had backed down, but Eddie fretted that President Stephen Douglas with Jefferson Davis at his side would do it in a heartbeat. He had imagined the arrival of a Federal Army commanded by militant Southerners surrounding Cass County then going house-to-house to sweep every Negro up into captivity.
Eddie was especially at risk because his family’s escape had been recorded by their owners as a property loss. He had felt cold fear in his belly when a neighbor had once shown him his name in the classified section of a Detroit paper identifying him as a runaway slave known to be at large in Michigan.
Emma was a bit more secure because her former owners had long since passed away. Their heirs had never bothered to retrieve an inherited runaway house servant. But she would never be entirely safe because she had no proof of manumission. Her title of ownership was still somewhere in the Delaware probate courts. Furthermore, slave catchers merely had to claim that they were her former owners. There weren’t very many whose consciences would be troubled by giving false testimony claiming that any Negro they happened to run across had once belonged to them. Without proof of manumission she was at any slave catcher’s mercy.
