Team of Rivals

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

On October 1, en route to Chicago, Seward’s train made a brief stop in Springfield. “There was a rush into and about the windows of the car in which Mr. Seward was seated,” observed a correspondent. Lincoln and Trumbull had waited with the crowd and came aboard to pay their respects. Lincoln “was a revelation,” young Adams recorded in his diary. “There he was, tall, shambling, plain and good-natured. He seemed shy to a degree, and very awkward in manner; as if he felt out of place, and had a realizing sense that properly the positions should be reversed. Seward too appeared constrained.” Adams undoubtedly ascribed his own feelings to Lincoln, who most likely did not feel “out of place” at all.

  This was the first time Lincoln and Seward had met since the evening they spent together in Massachusetts in 1848. “Twelve years ago you told me that this cause would be successful,” Lincoln told him, referring to the antislavery crusade, “and ever since I have believed that it would be.”

  During their conversation, Lincoln asked Seward if he would be willing in his upcoming Chicago speech to address a certain problematic subject: John Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an argument the party was trying to avoid—that a Republican win would bring an eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce Seward, Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans “would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily agreed and made it clear in his speech that Republicans were not attacking slavery in the South, that securing freedom for the territories need not interrupt ordinary intercourse with the South. In distancing themselves from Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.

  Seward’s tour came to a triumphant close on October 6. His train pulled into Auburn, where a “noisy throng” gave him a warm welcome home. “Seward, in fact, never appeared so well as at home,” young Adams observed. “He walked the streets exchanging greetings with everyone.” His responses were “all genuine, the relations were kindly, unaffected, neighborly.” Seward’s return created “an impression of individuality approaching greatness.” It was a journey Adams would never forget.

  Although Lincoln himself made no public statements or speeches, he labored constantly on his campaign and fully justified Weed’s appraisal of his political acumen. He strove to hold his coalition together, while disrupting efforts of his opponents to unite on fusion tickets. He sent emissaries to his supporters with instructions to solve campaign problems and heal divisions. Indirectly, he sought to clarify his position on important issues without breaking his vow of silence. He rigorously abstained from making patronage commitments. Responding to Senator Trumbull’s suggestion that he make some pledges in New York, Lincoln replied, “Remembering that Peter denied his Lord with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not.”

  Despite the unremitting, consuming labor of organizing his campaign, Lincoln somehow found time to write a humorous fictional dialogue between Breckinridge and Douglas. He also answered many of the endless letters he received, writing personal, unpretentious replies to supporters and well-wishers of every kind. An author wishing to dedicate his new legal work to Lincoln was answered: “I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.” In mid-October, he replied to eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, who had recommended that he grow a beard, “for your face is so thin” and “all the ladies like whiskers.” After lamenting the fact that he had no daughter of his own, he wondered: “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?” Nonetheless, he proceeded to grow a beard. By January 1861, John Hay would pen a witty couplet: “Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant—Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.”

  Recognizing that much of the positive news he received from friends was biased, Lincoln implored his supporters to give straightforward accounts of his prospects in each state. He worried about reports from Maine, New York, and Chicago, and brooded over the lack of solid information from Pennsylvania. His political objectives in the Keystone State were to establish his soundness on the tariff issue and heal the ominous divisions between the followers of Cameron and Curtin, the gubernatorial candidate. Lincoln always understood the importance of what he described as “the dry, and irksome labor” of building organizations to get out the vote, while most politicians preferred “parades, and shows, and monster meetings.”

  He enthusiastically supported Carl Schurz’s “excellent plan” for mobilizing the German-American vote, and assured Schurz that “your having supported Gov. Seward, in preference to myself in the convention, is not even remembered by me for any practical purpose…to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man stands nearer my heart than yourself.” A large part of the German-American vote would go to Lincoln, aiding his victories in the Northwest.

  Although concerned with progress in all the Northern states, he focused his attention primarily on the critical West. He urged Caleb Smith to do his utmost in Indiana, believing that nothing would affect the November results in Illinois more strongly than the momentum provided by an Indiana victory in the October state elections. In July, he sent Nicolay to an Indiana supporter who wished to prevent a Bell ticket from being placed on the ballot. “Ascertain what he wants,” Lincoln instructed Nicolay. “On what subjects he would converse with me. And the particulars if he will give them. Is an interview indispensable? Tell him my motto is ‘Fairness to all,’ but commit me to nothing.”

  Having pledged to make no new statement on public issues, Lincoln had surrogates present excerpts from his previous speeches to reinforce his positions. He had Judge Davis show Cameron selections of pro-tariff speeches he had made in the 1840s, and then cautioned Cameron: “Before this reaches you, my very good friend, Judge Davis, will have called upon you, and, perhaps, shown you the ‘scraps.’…Nothing about these, must get into the news-papers.” This tone reveals Lincoln’s keen awareness that notes from unpublished thirteen-year-old speeches stretched his vow of silence, but he hoped the assurances they provided would corral Cameron’s powerful influence in Pennsylvania. Cameron replied that he was pleased by the content of Lincoln’s earlier writings.

  To a correspondent who sought his intervention in the discord between Cameron and Curtin, Lincoln replied: “I am slow to listen to criminations among friends, and never expouse their quarrels on either side…allow by-gones to be by-gones, and look to the present & future only.” Yet at the same time, he informed Leonard Swett, who was preparing a trip to Pennsylvania, that he was very concerned about former congressman Joseph Casey’s disclosures that the Cameron faction lacked confidence in the Pennsylvania Central Committee, controlled by Curtin. “Write Mr. Casey,” Lincoln urged, “suggest to him that great caution and delicacy of action, is necessary in that matter.” Meanwhile, Republican money flowed into Pennsylvania. “After all,” wrote Republican National Committeeman John Goodrich of Massachusetts, “Pennsylvania is the Sebastopol we must take.”

  Lincoln turned his political attention to every state where his campaign experienced difficulty. Hearing that two Republican seats might be lost in Maine’s September elections, he told his vice presidential mate, Hannibal Hamlin, that “such a result…would, I fear, put us on the down-hill track, lose us the State elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and probably ruin us on the main turn in November. You must not allow it.” In August, troubled by a letter received from Rhode Island “intimating that Douglas is in-listing some rich men there, who know how to use money, and that it is endangering the State,” Lincoln asked Rhode Island’s senator James Simmons, “How is this? Please write me.” In the end, the September elections in New England favored the Republicans, preparing the way for the great October contests in the
West.

  Lincoln was not alone in his assessment that the October state elections in Indiana and Pennsylvania would prove critical to the fortunes of the Republican Party. On the eve of the state elections, Judge Davis told his son that “tomorrow is the most important day in the history of the Country.” Lincoln’s camp was elated by the positive results as large Republican majorities piled up in both states. When Judge Davis first heard the exciting news, Ward Lamon reported back to Lincoln, “he was trying an important criminal case, which terminated in his Kicking over the Clerk’s desk, turned a double somersault and adjourned court until after the presidential Election.” If the three-hundred-pound Davis actually performed such a stunt, it was a miracle second only to Lincoln’s nomination. But there was no question that Davis was thrilled. “We are all in the highest glee on acct of the elections,” he wrote his wife, Sarah. “Mr. Lincoln will evidently be the next Pres’t.” That Saturday night, Davis traveled to Springfield to celebrate with the Lincolns, Trumbull, and Governor Corwin. “I never was better entertained,” he rejoiced, though he confessed that Mary was still “not to my liking.” She appears to be “in high feather,” he continued. “I am in hopes that she will not give her husband any trouble.”

  Mary reveled in her newfound celebrity. She delighted in the crowds of visitors coming to her house, the artists pleading to paint her husband’s portrait, the prominent politicians waiting for the chance to converse with the presidential nominee. With pride, and perhaps a shade of spite toward the man who had so often bested her husband, she noted that a reception for Stephen Douglas in Springfield had attracted only thirty people when hundreds were expected. “This rather looks as if his greatness had passed away,” she commented to a friend.

  Still, Mary remained terribly anxious that ultimate success might once again prove elusive. “You used to be worried, that I took politics so cooly,” she confessed to her friend Hannah Shearer; “you would not do so, were you to see me now. Whenever I have time, to think, my mind is sufficiently exercised for my comfort…I scarcely know, how I would bear up, under defeat. I trust that we will not have the trial.”

  For weeks, Stephen Douglas had been barnstorming the country, having decided immediately after his nomination to defy custom. Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country, from the New England states to the Northwest, from the border states to the South, becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”

  Douglas was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when he heard the news of the Republican victories in Indiana and Pennsylvania, which destroyed any hope he might have had for victory. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” he declared. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” It was a courageous move, his “finest hour,” according to Allan Nevins. Exhausted from his nonstop weeks of campaigning, Douglas faced one hostile audience after another as he moved into the Deep South. No longer hoping to gain support for his candidacy, he campaigned for the survival of the Union. “I believe there is a conspiracy on foot to break up this Union,” he warned an audience in Montgomery, Alabama. “It is the duty of every good citizen to frustrate the scheme…if Lincoln is elected, he must be inaugurated.”

  Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election. “The cardinal error of the Republicans,” Nevins writes, was their failure to deal candidly with “the now imminent danger of secession.” Their dismissal of the looming possibility of secession was in part, but only in part, a deliberate tactic to ignore the threat so that voters would not be scared away from the Republican ticket. Beyond that, they simply did not believe that the threat was serious. After all, the South had made similar threats intermittently for the past forty years. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later admitted, “we all dwelt in a fool’s Paradise.” Though Northern Republicans had undoubtedly seen the threatening editorials in Southern newspapers, they continued to believe, as Lincoln told a journalist friend, that the movement was simply “a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North.”

  In mid-August, Lincoln assured one of his supporters, John Fry, that “people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.” Many in the South were equally skeptical. A Tennessee editor later admitted that “the cry of disunion had been raised so often that few had taken it seriously during the campaign. Evidently the ‘Northern sectionalists’ had believed it to be ‘all talk’…while most intelligent Southerners had assumed that it was ‘an idle menace, made to sway Northern sentiment.’”

  Bates likewise shrugged off Southern threats as the desperation of belligerent politicians, while Seward openly scorned the taunts of secession: “they cry out that they will tear the Union to pieces…‘Who’s afraid?’ Nobody’s afraid.” His audience echoed: “Nobody!” Among Lincoln’s colleagues, only Frank Blair, Jr., recognized that the distortions of Lincoln’s speeches in the Southern papers and the “misrepresentations” of extremists who intimated the Republicans intended an attack on the South had created “a large and influential class who are even now ready to apply the torch which will light the fires of civil discord.” Still, Blair believed, these extremists would not succeed and “this glorious Union” would not “be sundered in consequence of the triumph of our party.” Even John Breckinridge, the South’s standard-bearer, sought to distance himself from Southern extremists. His sole campaign speech refuted charges that he favored splitting up the Union.

  The realization that the “irrepressible conflict” might prove more than rhetoric came too late. The divided house would indeed fall. These phrases, intended by Seward and Lincoln as historical prophecies, were perceived by many in the South as threats—imminent and meant to be answered.

  With the October elections, the campaign had gained decisive momentum, but it was not yet over. With four candidates dividing the vote, Lincoln would have to capture New York’s pivotal 35 electoral votes to win an electoral majority and avoid throwing the election into the House. He relied on Thurlow Weed to manage the campaign in New York, but continued to seek other perspectives and intelligence. “I have a good deal of news from New-York,” Lincoln told former congressman John Pettit, “but, of course, it is from friends, and is one-sided…. It would seem that assurances to this point could not be better than I have. And yet it may be delusive.”

  The Empire State posed unique problems for Republicans. New York was home to large numbers of traditionally Democratic Irish immigrants who were unfriendly to the antislavery cause. In addition, New York City contained an influential class of merchants and manufacturers who viewed Republicanism as a threat to their commercial relations with the South. If these groups united against Lincoln, and if, as the Douglas people believed, Seward’s partisans remained unreconciled to Lincoln’s nomination, New York could easily be lost.

  Lincoln recognized these complications from the outset, warning Weed in August that “there will be the most extraordinary effort ever made, to carry New-York for Douglas.” He feared that Douglas was “managing the Bell-element with great adroitness,” and might well obtain a fusion of the two forces, thereby keeping the state from the Republicans. Less worried than Lincoln, Weed nonetheless left nothing to chance. He wrote to Seward in late October from the Astor House in New York City: “Can you afford to make a soothing speech in this city?…A speech in the spirit that you delivered last in the Senate, showing that it is the business of Republicans and the mission of the Republican Party to preserve the Union…that there is not an aggressive Plank in the Republican Platform…. I think it would finish the work.” Seward agreed to come to New York at once. His speech, even in this Democratic stronghold, was punctuated by wild applause, and when he finished, “the whole audience broke forth into the most tumultuo
us cheering.”

  ON ELECTION DAY, November 6, 1860, the citizens of Springfield were awakened at sunrise by cannonade and rousing band music “to stir whatever sluggish spirits there might be among the populace.” Lincoln spent the morning in his quarters at the State House, receiving and entertaining visitors. Samuel Weed of the New York Times long remembered the atmosphere in the room that morning. Lincoln “was chatting with three or four friends as calmly and as amiably as if he had started on a picnic.” Tipping his armchair backward to prop his long legs atop the woodstove, he made such detailed inquiry into all the local races that “one would have concluded that the District Attorneyship of a county of Illinois was of far more importance than the Presidency.”

  Lincoln had originally declined to vote himself, believing that “the candidate for a Presidential office ought not to vote for his own electors,” but Herndon insisted that if he cut off the presidential electors at the top, he could still vote for all the state and local offices. Warming to the idea, Lincoln headed over at about three o’clock to the polling place at the courthouse. His appearance drew a large crowd, “who welcomed him with immense cheering, and followed him in dense numbers along the hall and up stairs into the Court room,” where he was hailed with another wild “burst of enthusiasm.”

  At five, he headed home to have supper with Mary and the boys, returning to the State House at seven, accompanied by Judge Davis and a few friends. An immense crowd followed him into the Capitol, leading one supporter to suggest that he ask everyone but his closest friends to withdraw. “He said he had never done such a thing in his life, and wouldn’t commence now.” When the polls had closed, the first dispatches began to filter into the telegraph office. A correspondent from the Missouri Democrat noted that throughout the evening, “Lincoln was calm and collected as ever in his life, but there was a nervous twitch on his countenance when the messenger from the telegraphic offices entered that revealed an anxiety within that no coolness from without could repress.” The first dispatch, indicating a strong Republican win in Decatur, Illinois, was “borne into the Assembly hall as a trophy of victory, to be read to the crowd,” who responded with great shouts of joy. Though the early returns were incomplete, it was observed that Lincoln “seemed to understand their bearing on the general result in the State and commented upon every return by way of comparison with previous elections.”