Nowhere did the product of such relentless discipline reap greater rewards than at Cooper Union in New York, where he accepted a lecture invitation which Salmon Chase had earlier declined. Understanding the importance of making a strong impression on an audience in Seward’s home state, Lincoln spent many weeks extensively researching the attitudes toward slavery of each of the thirty-nine original signers of the Constitution, allowing him to demonstrate that a close reading of their writings and statements revealed that a clear majority had marked slavery “as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.” Accordingly, the new Republicans, Lincoln claimed, were the authentic conservatives, the party closest to the words and intentions of the framers. He reached out to the South, speaking as a mediator, calling for calmness and deliberation as the shrapnel from explosions (the brutal assault on Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by a southern congressman, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision claiming Negroes were not citizens, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry) severely lacerated the country. Yet beneath the well-documented, crystalline logic of his argument and the moderate tone he preached, there surged an ardor so profoundly felt that even the more radical members of the audience were shaken.
Two major tenets ran through every public statement Lincoln had made since he reentered public life in 1854: no extension of slavery into the territories; no interference with slavery where it already existed. While Seward, in the months leading up to the convention, endeavored to soften the fiery rhetoric that had delighted abolitionists, and Bates sought to win liberal support by proposing equal constitutional rights for all citizens, Lincoln remained steadfast. His adherence to the two central party tenets placed him precisely on the intersection of the two lines that marked the perfect mean of the extreme elements of the Republican Party. Nor was his “avoidance of extremes” the result of calculation; it was, the Chicago Daily Press and Tribune pointed out, “the natural consequence of an equable nature and a mental constitution that is never off its balance.”
As the convention opening drew near and support for Lincoln’s candidacy grew stronger, Lincoln himself took nothing for granted. Realizing that a successful bid would require the unanimous support of the Illinois delegation, he worked to bridge the divisions within the state party, openly asking for help from delegates representing different factions in the party. “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me not to be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates,” he wrote to a politician in the northern part of the state. “Can you not help me in this matter, in your end of the vineyard?” When the state Republicans met in convention ten days prior to the National Convention, they passed a resolution instructing the delegates to “vote as a unit” for Abraham Lincoln. By contrast, Chase did not lift a finger to ensure a united Ohio delegation, having mistakenly assumed that every delegate would automatically vote for him, given all he had done for the party and the state.
No team in Chicago worked harder than Lincoln’s team. While some of the intimate circle had political ambitions of their own, “most of them” Henry Whitney observed, “worked con amore, chiefly from love of the man, his lofty moral tone, his pure political morality.” Indeed, two of the key members of Lincoln’s team were former Democrats Norman Judd and Lyman Trumbull, whose refusal to cross party lines in 1855 had cost Lincoln his first Senate election. Lincoln’s magnanimity (in contrast to the enemies Seward and Chase had created in their climb to power) had brought both men to his side in abiding friendship.
When the balloting began, Seward was considered the front-runner, followed by Chase and Bates. On the third ballot, however, to the surprise of many, Abraham Lincoln emerged as the nominee. Over the years, people have debated the factors that led to Lincoln’s victory. Some have argued that the verdict represented “the defeat of Seward rather than the nomination of Lincoln.” Others have pointed to luck—that the convention was held in Chicago and that Illinois was a key battleground state. While happenstance played a role, in the end, Lincoln’s victory was due predominantly to his leadership skills—his shrewd comprehension of the lay of the land, growing confidence in his own judgment and intuition, unmatched work ethic, rhetorical abilities, equable nature, and elevated ambition. He never allowed his ambition to consume his kindheartedness or to modify his allegiance to the antislavery cause. While the delegates may not have recognized the true measure of Lincoln’s leadership strengths, events would soon prove that they had chosen the best candidate to lead their new party to victory.
* * *
From the start, Lincoln discerned that his first task was to unite the candidates he had defeated into a single Republican movement. To that end, he wrote a personal letter to Chase humbly asking for his “especial assistance” in the campaign; he dispatched a close friend to St. Louis to beseech Judge Bates to write a public letter on his behalf; and most importantly, he secured Seward’s willingness to act as his chief surrogate on the campaign trail. Pursuing a strategic policy of self-restraint, he remained in Springfield throughout the entire campaign. Aware that anything he said or wrote would be taken out of context to inflame sectionalism for partisan purposes, he simply pointed to the party platform and his many published speeches when asked about an issue; these carefully crafted documents, he maintained, fully represented his opinions on the central issues of the day.
By the fall of 1860, the slavery issue had smashed the Democratic Party much as it had shattered the Whigs. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry had hardened southern attitudes; no longer supporting Douglas’s popular sovereignty, the southern wing demanded explicit protection from Congress to bring slaves into the new territories regardless of the vote of the people. Accordingly, when Douglas became the nominee of the Democratic Party, southern Democrats walked out and nominated their own candidate, Kentucky senator John Breckinridge. Before the split, Lincoln told a friend, Republican “chances were more than equal”; now, with a divided party, the Democratic chances seemed “very slim.” Nonetheless, he understood that nothing must be left to chance.
Lincoln even agreed, after much hesitation, to write a short autobiography to put some muscle, sinew, and fat onto the bare bones of his scanty résumé and help construct a campaign persona. While he refused to sentimentalize the extreme hardships of his frontier childhood, he supplied memories of building his log cabin and splitting the rail fence that surrounded its ten acres. Soon rails purportedly split by young Lincoln began surfacing at public gatherings. The emblem caught fire: Rails were embossed on campaign medals, went zigzagging across newspaper cartoons, were motifs in campaign slogans and jingles. While Lincoln never claimed he had split a particular rail presented to him with great fanfare, he acknowledged that he had indeed been “a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat boat, just what might happen to any man’s son!” The story of his life and his laborious efforts to educate himself made Lincoln into “a man of the people,” the American dream made flesh.
On Election Day, Lincoln was understandably restless. Struggle had been his birthright, adversity his expectation. When his youthful dream of becoming the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois had been dashed with the spectacular demise of his internal improvement projects, he had fallen into depression. A period of doubt and self-assessment had followed his disappointing congressional term. Yet, neither of his two Senate losses had triggered personal doubt or depression. On the contrary, he considered both defeats positive steps in the advancement of the antislavery movement. By then, he was “so thoroughly interwoven in the issues before the people,” his law partner William Herndon observed, that “he had become part of them.” The inner voice that anticipated defeat had been stilled by the strength of his belief in the antislavery cause. When the returns came in, a jubilant fifty-two-year-old Lincoln learned that he had won.
This victory was the cu
lmination of a different ambition than that of a twenty-three-year-old who had striven to bolster his self-worth by the esteem in which he was held by his fellow men. He now emanated the quiet sense of responsibility he had found in his role model, Henry Clay, regarded by all as the “man for a crisis.” His spoken and written words were pared down, leaner, more measured, cautious, centered, more determined, displaying a rhetoric less hectic yet no less impassioned than the poetry he had delivered half a lifetime earlier at the Lyceum. He had found his mature voice.
SIX
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“The light has gone out of my life”
On the floor of the Albany legislature, Theodore Roosevelt received the joyful telegram that he was now father to his first child, a healthy baby girl. When shortly afterward a second telegram was delivered, all liveliness drained from his being. He rushed from the floor and caught a train to New York City, where his family had congregated to support his wife, Alice, and celebrate the birth of their child. In the next six hours, Roosevelt would be plunged into such an excessive nightmare of grief as to be found only in grand tragedy.
“There is a curse on this house,” his brother, Elliott, told him upon his arrival. “Mother is dying and Alice is dying too.” By midnight, both women were in a semiconscious state. His forty-nine-year-old mother, Mittie, still a youthful-looking, beautiful woman, had been suffering from what was considered to be a severe cold, but which turned out to be a lethal case of typhoid fever. Theodore was at his mother’s bedside at 3 a.m. when she died. Less than twelve hours later, as he enfolded his young wife in his arms, Alice died from what was later diagnosed as acute kidney disease, its symptoms masked by her pregnancy. In his diary that night, the twenty-six-year-old Theodore placed a large X, along with the simple words “The light has gone out of my life.” Two days later, he recorded: “We spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others. For joy or sorrow my life has now been lived out.”
In Albany, the legislature voted unanimously to adjourn until the following Monday night, a marked tribute to the popular assemblyman, “wholly unprecedented in the legislative annals.” At the double funeral service held at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, party bosses and dozens of assemblymen were present, along with members of New York society and scores of people who had attended Roosevelt Senior’s funeral six years before. During the service, Theodore appeared to his former tutor, Arthur Cutler, “in a dazed stunned state. He does not know what he does or says.” The pastor nearly lost command of his voice as he noted the “peculiar” circumstances that made the service especially sorrowful. “Two members of the same family, of the same home were on the same day taken from life and were to be buried together,” he said. He did not remember anything like it in the course of his long ministry.
In a rare introspective reply to a condolence from his Maine friend, Bill Sewall, Roosevelt revealed what would become a full-blown stoic fatalism. “It was a grim and evil fate, but I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.” Two days after the funeral, Roosevelt returned to the Assembly, telling a friend: “I think I should go mad if I were not employed.” He seemed “a changed man,” remarked his colleague Isaac Hunt; “from that time on there was a sadness about his face that he never had before. He did not want anybody to talk to him about it, and did not want anybody to sympathize with him. It was a grief that he had in his own soul.” To his sister Bamie, to whom he had bequeathed total responsibility for the care and well-being of his newborn daughter, he wrote: “We are now holding evening sessions and I am glad we are; indeed the more we work the better I like it.”
He had always applied himself at a pace governed by inordinate energy. Now, driven by the need to mitigate his misery, he lashed himself into a legislative frenzy, pushing one reform bill after another onto the floor, heedless of parliamentary procedure, failing to weigh criticisms of colleagues. It did not take long to squander the political capital which the goodwill and sympathy of the old machine politicians and the young reformers had bestowed upon him after his grievous losses. Before the session came to an end, he made the determination that he could not bear returning to Albany for another legislative term. His career in the state legislature was over.
There remained one crusade left to fight—one that gave Roosevelt a temporary sense of purpose but would ultimately worsen his depression. At the Republican National Convention in June, he led a small but vocal independent group supporting reformer Vermont senator George Edmunds for president against James G. Blaine, the choice of the party bosses. With good reason, reformers identified Blaine as an emblem of the corrupt moral standards of the post–Civil War Republican Party. While Roosevelt’s refusal to support Blaine earned him “the bitter and venomous hatred” of the political bosses, it gained him widespread admiration among the ranks of reformist Republicans. To many young men, Charles Evans Hughes recalled, Roosevelt “seemed to incarnate everything that was noble and worthwhile in politics.” He was like “a splendid breeze” that made “everyone feel brighter and better.”
Roosevelt’s reformist zeal failed to carry the delegates. When the votes were finally counted, the bosses prevailed. Blaine trounced Edmunds. “Our defeat is an overwhelming rout,” Roosevelt told Bamie. “Of all the candidates, I consider Blaine as by far the most objectionable, because his personal honesty as well as his faithfulness as a public servant, are both open to questions.” That he was victorious “speaks badly for the intelligence of the mass of my party.” Veteran Republican reformer George William Curtis, who had joined Roosevelt’s fight, lamented: “I was at the birth of the Republican Party and I fear I am to witness its death.” The nomination of Blaine led scores of Republican independents to abandon the party. Calling themselves “mugwumps,” they pledged not only to vote but to advocate for the Democratic nominee.
The independents were certain that Roosevelt would join their ranks. In a state of fury when he left the convention, Roosevelt told a reporter that he could never vote for Blaine and would give “hearty support” to any upright Democrat. In the weeks that followed, however, he backslid, announcing that “by inheritance and education” he was a Republican, a party man who believed in party government. He had acted with the party “in the past,” and felt obliged to act with it “in the future.” Not wanting to burn his bridges, he resolved that he would “abide by the outcome of the Republican convention.” Roosevelt’s fellow reformers were stunned. Reform newspapers, which had championed the young legislator, now considered him a traitor to the cause.
“Theodore Beware of Ambition: By that sin has fallen many another young man as promising as you,” warned the Boston Globe. By his actions, Roosevelt had initially angered the bosses. Now he enraged the independents, betrayed by his reversal and subsequent support for Blaine. “I have very little expectation of being able to keep in politics,” he told a New York journalist. “I can not regret enough the unfortunate turn in political affairs that has practically debarred me from taking any part in the fray,” he admitted to his friend Massachusetts representative Henry Cabot Lodge. “I think it will be a good many years before I get back into politics,” he despaired in a letter to his sister Bamie.
Feeling the need to escape from the catastrophe that beset his private life and the untenable political crisis in which he had bound himself, Roosevelt headed for the Badlands, where he had purchased a ranch the previous year. “I am going cattle ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and a part of the fall,” he told a reporter who was harassing him. “What I shall do after that I cannot tell.” Even then, jilted reformers were not appeased. “No ranch or other hiding place in the world” can shield a man who backs a man like Blaine, the Evening Post scornfully observed. “Punching cattle is the best way to avoid campaigning” was Roosevelt’s unhappy rejoinder.
* * *
So began a sojourn on the
western frontier he would come to regard as “the most important educational asset” of his entire life. When asked two decades later which chapter of his life he would choose to remember, including the presidency, he said: “I would take the memory of my life on the ranch with its experiences close to Nature and among the men who lived nearest her.” During this western interlude, Roosevelt would gather material for the most accomplished writing ventures of his life—Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, and The Winning of the West. But by far the greatest and most enduring of the projects during these months and years of reaction to the trauma he had experienced was the work of his own healing, growth, and self-transformation.
In selecting the four-member team to manage his ranching operations, Roosevelt revealed the characteristic sure touch with which he would choose associates in the years ahead. After spending only two weeks with Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris during his hunting trip the previous fall, he had determined on the spot to trust them with $40,000 (one-third of the money his father had bequeathed him) to buy and tend a thousand head of cattle. To partner with him in the daily operation of the ranch, he chose his Maine guide, Bill Sewall, and Sewall’s nephew, Will Dow. Neither man had prior experience with cattle ranching. That made small difference to Roosevelt. Astutely reading the character of both men, he guaranteed them “a share of anything” the new enterprise might earn, while promising that he would absorb any losses. He also invited them to live with him in the ranch house they would together design and build. “He never was a man to hesitate to make a decision,” Sewall recalled years later. Once he could discern “a streak of honor” in a man, that man could be trusted.
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