He had not mentioned Pemberton. His aim was longer range—and presidential. Instead, he began his speech with a well-wrought repudiation of Stephen Douglas, which in this case, was a well-wrought repudiation of the notion of popular sovereignty. Douglas had just published a justification of it in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and Lincoln had responded, even mimicking Douglas by describing popular sovereignty as the “ ‘gur-reat pur-rinciple’ that ‘if one man would enslave another, no third man should object.’ ”
Lincoln wasn’t really joking, and his quip merely punctuated what was an adroit refutation of Douglas’s and the Democrats’ contention that the Constitution forbids the federal government to control (which is to say prohibit) slavery in the federal territories. “Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we now live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now,” Douglas had said, giving Lincoln his opening. With his own constructionist reading of the Constitution—and his unassailable logic—Lincoln demonstrated that the founding fathers, who well understood the issue of slavery, did not forbid the government to legislate it. Nor did they intend to foster its extension; rather they “left an irrefutable record of their conviction that slavery should be prohibited in the territories.” Republicans were not the destructive extremists, outlaws, and reptiles (Lincoln’s word) that the Southerners made them out to be. They were traditionalists.
After an unflappable rebuttal of the Democratic position without resorting to any notion of a higher law—that would have taken him beyond the limits of the Constitution—Lincoln boldly concluded: “I defy any man to show that any one of them [the founders who formed the government], in his whole life, declared that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery the federal territories.” [Loud applause.]
He then addressed himself to the “Southern people.” He denied the charges that Republicans were sectional, radical, or incendiary. He said John Brown was no Republican. And, what was more, Lincoln pointed out, no Republican had been implicated in the Harpers Ferry attack; if Southerners insisted that Republicans were “guilty in the matter,” then “you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact.” Anything else was slander.
As to Hinton Helper’s book, which Lincoln also mentioned, he wisely pointed out that “there is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half votes.” One could not destroy that sentiment, or if one tried to destroy it—Lincoln had listened to the apocalyptic warnings of the fire-eaters—regardless of “the peaceful channel of the ballot-box,” what would one gain? He knew: “You will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.”
This was not bluster. This was Lincoln making perfectly clear to his listeners and those who could soon read his speech in the national newspapers that he knew the South had been threatening war. He called the bluff. “You will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! [Laughter.] That is cool. [Great laughter.] A highway man holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”
Lincoln had not spoken of abolition. Nor would he belabor the notion of a divided house except insofar as he blamed Southern radicals for the division. Rather he was to be a man of the people—though far surpassing almost everyone in eloquence and logic—a champion of free labor who possessed the gift of humor. (Southerners such as Mary Chesnut said, “If this country can be joked and laughed out of its rights, he is the kind-hearted fellow to do it.”) Yet his speech, though witty, was determined, unemotional, and moved incrementally and with oratorical skill into a stirring call to devotion and dedication, duty and defiance.
Concluding, Lincoln turned his attention—“a few words now”—to Republicans. For after defying the Democratic interpretation of the Constitution and denying with the same logic—and wit—the Southerners’ characterization of the Republican Party, he reiterated the legal obligation to let slavery alone where it was “because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.” Yet he also felt an obligation, the Republican obligation, to prevent slavery’s spread into the territories, to prevent its overrunning the Free States, and to abide by the Constitution. “Never 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. [Applause.] 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.”
“NO FORMER EFFORT in the line of speech-making had cost Lincoln so much time and thought,” said Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon. No wonder.
Lincoln had initially been invited to New York to speak at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn partly to diminish Seward’s strength among eastern Republicans, for many of them felt Seward could not win a general election; or they supported candidates of their own, such as Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, another outspoken antislavery man, or even the more conservative Edward Bates of Missouri or Francis Preston Blair, Jr., of Maryland, a member of a powerful political family.
Lincoln doubtless knew all that, though he learned of the change of venue—from the church in Brooklyn to the Cooper Institute in Manhattan—only at the eleventh hour. He had settled into his room at the Astor House, near City Hall and New York’s Park Row (where Greeley’s Tribune was published) and diagonally across from the Barnum Museum. Those days, crowds were clustering around an exhibit Barnum called “the missing link.” Building on the popularity of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Barnum had hired William Henry Johnson, a black man from New Jersey with an unusually small cranium (caused by a neurological disorder, microcephaly), and claimed to have “captured” this “creature” in Africa. Dressed in a fur suit, Johnson silently performed for Barnum—he was not allowed to talk—under the sign “WHAT IS IT?” The show was strategically placed near a wax statue of John Brown. One newspaper quipped that the person was “neither white man nor monkey, therefore Black Republican”—like Lincoln.
Appearances counted. Despite the change of its venue, Lincoln’s speech had been heavily publicized, and Lincoln knew that the time had come, as John O’Sullivan once told Nathaniel Hawthorne, for him to be manufactured into a personage. So Lincoln went over to the studio of Mathew Brady. Brady too had learned that the public’s appetite for images was insatiable. And since everyone craved the illusion of immortality, formerly conferred only on the aristocracy, he was profiting from the innovation that his brilliant assistant from Scotland, Alexander Gardner, had brought to the studio. Formerly a chemist, Gardner had introduced into the operation the carte de visite, a forerunner of the snapshot. These were made from the wet-plate collodion negatives Gardner had also brought to the business. Wildly successful because they were sturdier than the fragile daguerreotype, they were traded and exchanged among the hoi polloi, and households across America began stuffing albums with their own likenesses as well as those of the rich and the famous. The culture of celebrity—the cash-and-carry kind—was born.
“The sun is a faithful biographer, and no respecter of persons,” the popular author Gail Hamilton had recently written. She was speaking of Brady’s photographs. “He gives us men as he saw them, shining down on their faces at noonday.” Hamilton was wrong. Full sunlight was no longer a requirement of photography, which was nothing if not artifice: to prevent the slightest movement that would spoil the picture, for instance, an iron clamp had to be locked into place to hold the sitter’s head stock-still. The misery of the trapped sitter shows up on many an old portrait, including that of Abraham Lincoln.
On the day of the lecture, Lincoln sauntered into Brady’s gallery. The ma
estro would typically usher his clients into a grand salon, an overstuffed pleasure-dome draped with velvet curtains and shrouded in gold paper where his subjects—whether poet, general, or gawky lawyer about to deliver an important speech—could feel, among the marble and bric-à-brac, insulated from the clang of the omnibus and the clamor of the dirty city.
Brady typically posed his subjects, iron clamp notwithstanding, among appropriate props to provide a desired effect. In the case of Lincoln, they included a stack of books and a movable pillar, suggesting firmness, tradition, and longevity. He then moved the camera back to accentuate Lincoln’s height and, to hide his long neck, he pulled up Lincoln’s collar.
Soon Lincoln’s likeness appeared in Harper’s, in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, in popular magazines and journals, and in the campaign biographies soon to be celebrating Lincoln as a backwoods rail-splitter, sleeves rolled up. Currier & Ives brought out lithographic copies of the Brady image for home consumption, and even caricatures of Lincoln as a Republican “What Is It?” came from Brady’s image. An intelligent friend of Lincoln’s, looking at the proliferation of Lincolns, knew what had happened. That photograph guaranteed Lincoln’s election, he said. A star was born.
(8)
A CLANK OF METAL
A clairvoyant told Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson that John Brown had sent her a message from Hell, where he now was: Brown said Johnson would be nominated for president. Old Brown didn’t have his information quite right, but it didn’t matter. Johnson would have been happy to settle for second place, as Stephen Douglas’s running mate, for he supposed he and Douglas, as a team, could beat Lincoln, who was admittedly looking pretty strong these days. In May, Lincoln had nosed out Republican front runner William Seward along with Salmon Chase and Edward Bates when shrewd political operators descended on Chicago. In the huge, tentlike building dubbed the “Wigwam” (because the Republican “chiefs” met there), they nominated Lincoln on the third ballot. The wooden rafters shook with the sound of thundering applause.
The Democrats didn’t choose Andrew Johnson. They didn’t choose Stephen Douglas either, or at least not entirely. The matter was far more complicated, and the Democrats were far more divided than the Republicans had been. In April, at their convention in Charleston, South Carolina, the Democrats’ Southern wing had put forward an “Alabama platform” authorizing a congressional slave code similar to the one Jefferson Davis had already introduced in Congress stipulating that slavery be protected in all territories. Infuriating the western states, the platform was a slap in the face to Douglas and popular sovereignty. Regardless, men such as Alabama’s William L. Yancey would not compromise. Never one to forgo a fight and still outraged by Harpers Ferry, Yancey reminded Southern Democrats, “Ours is the property invaded; ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace which is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake.” And when the convention began to tilt toward Douglas’s more moderate platform, Yancey stalked out, “smiling like a bridegroom,” as an observer noted. The Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Texas delegations followed, along with part of the Delaware and Arkansas delegations. Georgia left too. The grand Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson was falling apart.
With Robert Toombs and Jefferson Davis quieting the hotheads, the convention was rescheduled. In June, a month after Lincoln’s nomination, Democrats reconvened in Baltimore at the Front Street Theater. The second meeting didn’t resolve a thing. There was an unfriendly debate about whether those who walked out of the Charleston convention should be seated and whether the minority would pledge to support a majority candidate. Then someone suggested that the slave trade be reopened, and soon the delegates from Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, part of Maryland, California, Oregon, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas bolted. So did Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. “I will not sit in a convention where the African slave-trade—which is piracy by the laws of my country—is approvingly advocated.” The rump convention nominated Stephen Douglas for president (by a vote of two-thirds of the delegates who stayed) on a popular sovereignty platform, which included a plank denouncing state legislatures as revolutionary if they refused to execute the Fugitive Slave Act and a plank in favor of the acquisition of Cuba. His running mate was the wealthy, moderate Herschel Johnson of Georgia.
Southern Democrats and Buchanan’s followers—Buchanan despised Douglas as much as Douglas despised him—nominated Buchanan’s vice president, John C. Breckinridge, to run for president, with Joseph Lane of Oregon as the vice presidential candidate. Perhaps those Southern radicals hoped that a three-way race would throw the election into the hands of the House of Representatives—or, if Lincoln won, they could keep battling for secession and perhaps achieve it. But the gnomelike, sickly Alexander Stephens, a Douglas supporter, despaired of his fellow Georgians, who seemed glad to sacrifice their party for an abstraction called the “full measure of Southern rights” and worked themselves into a lather over the territories, where the people were indifferent to slavery and the climate not conducive to it anyway. Stephens argued, without much success, that these radicals did not understand that Douglas was actually “safe on slavery” and that he believed that slavery was better off in the Union than out of it. Demoralized by Baltimore, Stephens confided to a friend that “selfishness and personal ambition had taken possession of all.”
Retrospective analyses of the Charleston and Baltimore conventions are much too rational, for at those conventions, the delegates sweated and fulminated and worked each other up into a state of near frenzy. But Southern rights activists had not been bluffing. They truly did not want to compromise. They felt they had already compromised too much and that any more compromise was lily-livered submission to the North and, now, to Northern aggression. “Submission to the rule of a party who have openly declared themselves our enemies,” declared a Southerner, “and that they intend to destroy our property and (what is worse that they intended to degrade us and our families to an equality with our slaves), submission I say, under such circumstances is a thought to be entertained not for a moment.”
Yet compromisers had not entirely vanished, particularly among Border State Whigs. It was they who pulled together a Constitutional Union Party, one that represented the Constitution and “the Union as it is,” which is to say the Union as it once might have been, without the slavery question dominating every discussion. An amalgam of Know-Nothings and former Whigs (including Amos Lawrence), the Constitutional Union Party nominated the colorless, grimacing former senator John Bell of Tennessee along with the prolix Cotton Whig (that is, southerly inclined) Edward Everett of Massachusetts. As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, there was something clubbish, vague, and antediluvian about this almost benighted party, nostalgically looking backward.
Democratic schisms and Constitutional Unionists boded well for Lincoln. “I think the chances were more than equal that we could have beaten the Democracy united,” he said. “Divided, as it is, its chance appears indeed very slim.”
IT WAS A grinding campaign. In New York and elsewhere, youths dressed in paramilitary costumes, with long capes and black squarish hats, carried torches on four-foot poles, singing songs and proclaiming their support of Lincoln while they marched through the streets. They were the members of the so-called Wide-Awakes, militant organizations of young men, as many as 70,000 from coast to coast, who supported Republican candidates and protected them after dark. Denounced by fire-eaters such as Louis Wigfall as a newfangled Praetorian Guard, these enthusiastic Republicans were tired of compromising with the South but willing to support the compromises Lincoln offered, which seemed to them not compromises at all. They weren’t the only ones excited about Lincoln. Calling him the first workingman’s candidate, the Prussian-born Carl Schurz, who had experienced firsthand the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, energetically campaigned for Lincoln in the Midwest.
Stephen Douglas, who applied himself unstintingly, even obstinately, t
o whatever he chose to do, was also campaigning ceaselessly as if his decision to throw aside the reticence demanded from presidential candidates—the office was supposed to seek the man, not the other way around—released a new flood of venomous and self-destructive but indefatigable energy. Douglas called Lincoln a disunionist, a Black Republican, an amalgamationist, an insurrectionist, a crackpot, a monkey. Douglas was the Unionist (which he was) and the only one, he said, who could avert secession. He shouted until he was hoarse.
When Douglas realized that Lincoln might actually win, he realized what Republicans seemed not to acknowledge: the Union was in deep trouble. He hustled to the border states to campaign against secession and for one Union, indissoluble. As late as October and November, he was touring the Deep South to decry secession. While in Alabama, he and his wife suffered injuries when the upper deck of a steamboat collapsed in Montgomery, but though he had to hobble around on crutches, though he was exhausted, his voice was hoarse, and his health was not good, Douglas did not stop. Instead, he told increasingly irate audiences, some of whom pelted him with eggs, that a lawfully elected president, even a Lincoln, must lawfully resist secession. It was, as Allan Nevins wrote, his finest hour. And then, just seven months after the polls closed, the forty-eight-year-old Stephen Douglas was dead. The country had splintered, nothing was the same, the Little Giant had worn himself out.
Those seven months had been harrowing for everyone, not just Douglas. As election day approached, the Southern press, suspecting a Republican victory, issued threat after threat. “Whether there be secession, revolution, or what not, one thing is certain—Lincoln can never be President of the Southern States,” thundered the Weekly Montgomery Mail. Said the Lynchburg [Virginia] Republican, “the moment the lightning flash shall convey the intelligence of the election of Lincoln, [we] will unfurl to the breeze the flag of Disunion.” To a correspondent in Georgia, Lincoln’s election would bring “an abolition party in the Southern states, who will distribute arms and strychnine with which to murder their masters. It will encourage abolition ‘nigger’ stealers to steal your property, and by repealing the fugitive slave law, leave you without the slightest redress.” And a series of fires devastating large chunks of north Texas and downtown Dallas were immediately attributed to the abolitionists, who, it was said, had been recruiting black men. White vigilantes then murdered at least thirty and perhaps up to a hundred people, both black and white.
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