by Larry Tagg
The South now maintains that slavery is right, natural, and necessary. It shows that all divine and almost all human authority justifies it. The South further charges, that the little experiment of free society has been, from the beginning, a cruel failure, and that symptoms of failure are abundant in our North. While it is far more obvious that Negroes be slaves than whites—for they are only fit to labor, not to direct—yet the principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complection.
Pointing out that Biblical slaves were not black, the Enquirer concluded that “confining the jurisdiction of slavery to that race would be to weaken its scriptural authority.”
And while white men were not yet picking cotton in shackles, their liberties in the South were already violated. A Southerner could not teach a slave to read, nor could he hire one, or have one testify in court. He could not move or free his own slaves without permission. He could not speak against slavery, nor could he write, listen to, or read any opinions against slavery. An anonymous Virginian complained, “In Southern states the non-slave-holding whites are no longer free, a padlock has been placed on their mouths … , and they enjoy less liberty than the subjects of many European monarchs.” He and anyone who agreed with him, however, found it wise to keep quiet.
The South claimed to be democratic, but the aristocrats there had no belief in democracy. A belief in true democracy would have demanded a free discussion. But from the 1830s on, Southern leaders had decided that slavery could not be safely discussed. By this systematic repression in the South, an entire generation had grown up hearing and reading little but the speeches and editorials of the extremists among them. They had been deluded by these men into believing that all Northerners were abolitionists, rabidly hostile to their institutions. In the grip of a hallucination shaped by the “fire-eaters,” Southerners saw Abraham Lincoln as a deadlier John Brown, an avenger who would swoop down and destroy their society in an apocalypse of blood. It was only in a period that fostered a neglect of social duty that such a hallucination could become general. But this was such an age—the Age of Jackson, whose worship of the unfettered individual coincided fatally with the desperate striking-out of a Southern society that now dimly realized that its way of life was slouching toward oblivion.
Chapter 6
Lincoln’s Nomination
“Who is this huckster in politics?”
The United States in 1860 was in need of a statesman of the stature of a Washington, someone who could overawe the devils of division in America long enough to allow time to free the slaves without a convulsion of violence. We have seen how the rules of society and politics in the Age of Jackson conspired against the ascent of a great national healer, both by creating the white-hot heat of the crisis, and at the same time making the election of a great man improbable. But how was it that a figure as unlikely as Abraham Lincoln was raised up to lead the country at this most explosive moment in its history?
He was the least qualified candidate for President ever elected—a private citizen, an obscure country lawyer in a provincial western state. His only brief appearance in Washington had been as a one-term congressman from 1847-1849, after winning the Seventh Congressional District of central Illinois by a vote of 6,340 to 4,829. By 1860 his distant, unremarkable two years in Congress had left no ripple on the pool of public memory.
He had never run anything larger than a two-partner law office.
In late November 1859, with only six months until the Republican national convention of May 1860, the Philadelphia Press listed forty-five men whose names were prominently mentioned as possible presidential nominees. Abraham Lincoln was not among them.
Outside his state, Lincoln was remembered only for his losing U.S. Senate race against Steven Douglas. Two years before, in 1858, Lincoln had entered the Senate campaign against the wishes of the party bosses back east. So little respect did the seaboard Republicans have for Lincoln and his frontier state party that they pressured the Illinois organization not to oppose Douglas for the Senate seat—in effect, telling the Illinois Republicans to drop dead. The Easterners were in the throes of a love affair with the Little Giant, charmed by the spectacle of his death-grapple with the pro-slavery President Buchanan for control of the Democratic Party. America’s most famous Republican editor, the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, lauded Douglas, saying, “no public man in our day has evinced a nobler fidelity and courage.” Fellow anti-slavery editor William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post called him a “good-enough Republican.” They held out the belief that if Illinois Republicans made no contest against Douglas he would ultimately find a home in the Republican Party—and bring a hundred thousand Illinois Democrats with him. Illinoisans, however, knew Douglas better than that, and Lincoln’s backers resented the interference. The Republican Chicago Tribune grumbled about “a considerable notion pervading the brains of the political wet nurses at the East, that the barbarians of Illinois cannot take care of themselves.” A worried Lincoln wrote to a friend that “if the [New York] Tribune continues to din [Douglas’] praises into the ears of its five or ten thousand Republican readers in Illinois, it is more than can be hoped that all will stand firm.” But Illinois Republicans did stand firm, and rebuffed the Easterners at their state convention by declaring Lincoln their nominee.
The credentials of the antagonists were unequal. Douglas, the Democratic incumbent, was a two-term Illinois Senator and had been a national figure for more than a decade, an acknowledged candidate for the presidency. Lincoln had meanwhile toiled in obscurity as a circuit court lawyer, riding in a buggy from town to town, arguing cases in crude county courts during the day, telling funny stories in the evening, and sleeping two-to-a-bed with other circuit lawyers at night. His political ambitions had become reanimated by the national uproar over the Kansas question in the mid-50s, and for the previous two years he had helped organize the infant Republican Party in the state without attracting outside attention. Lincoln himself was unsure. About the time Lincoln entered upon the campaign he wrote down these thoughts: “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young men then—he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious—I perhaps quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him, it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation and is not unknown even in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached …; I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
Senator Douglas traveled the state in late summer of 1858 like the political star he was, in a private railroad car with a brass cannon on a flatcar in the rear. As the train approached a prairie town, a crew of two men in uniform would fire the cannon to boom the news ahead that the Little Giant was arriving. Conceding that Douglas’ crowds would be bigger than any he could draw, Lincoln shadowed Douglas on the first five towns on his tour, answering each of the Democrat’s speeches with one of his own. He often traveled on the same train that drew Douglas’ private car, riding as an ordinary passenger. Lincoln’s men distributed handbills at the Douglas gatherings, notifying the people where and when the Republican candidate would reply. The Democratic Chicago Times scoffed: “Lincoln must do something, even if that something is mean, sneaking, and disreputable. The cringing, crawling creature is hanging at the outskirts of Douglas meetings, begging the people to come and hear him.” Further,
Mr. Lincoln … with a desperate attempt at looking pleasant, said that he would not take advantage of Judge Douglas’ crowd, but would address ‘sich’ as liked to hear him in the evening at the courthouse … pleading his humility, and asking forgiveness of Heaven for his enemies, he stood washing his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water, until his friends, seeing that his mind was wandering, took him in charge and bundled him off the grounds.
Lincoln responded to the newspaper abuse by changing tactics. He chall
enged Douglas to a series of debates. The Senator was understandably reluctant: as the heavy favorite, he would only be giving the obscure Lincoln a share of his publicity and prestige by appearing with him and confronting him head-to-head. Nevertheless, he could not afford to refuse. Douglas consented to seven debates.
Those debates have passed into lore, although they are now viewed in a circus-mirror lens that magnifies Lincoln and dwarfs Douglas according to the former’s later achievements. Now famous as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, they were more properly the Douglas-Lincoln debates, according to the public standing of the two men at the time. Lincoln’s sinewy logic and pungent expression of Republican principles got him noticed for the first time by the watchful back east. The debates failed to win him the election, however. Douglas emerged the hero of the contest, holding his state for the Democrats while most of the North went for the Republicans. The seaboard Republicans, who cared nothing for Lincoln, were glad of Douglas’ triumph. They could trumpet the result as a rebuke to Douglas’ Democratic Party enemies, the pro-slavery Democrats in Washington. A disappointed Lincoln wrote a letter to a personal friend as if chiseling his own political epitaph: “Though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”
His friends refused to share his gloom. Encouraged by the notion that Douglas’ certain presidential run in 1860 would buoy Lincoln’s own career, since the debates had cast him in the public mind as Douglas’ nemesis, they resolved to run him for the presidency. (Democratic papers, of course, reversed the argument to disparage Lincoln. As the Cincinnati Enquirer saw it, “Without Douglas Lincoln would be nothing, and this he virtually admits by being nothing but anti-Douglas. At once a parasite and enemy, he labors insanely to destroy that upon which depends his own existence.”)
But the defeated Lincoln’s campaigning spirit was missing in 1859. He did not share his friends’ optimism—he said that he didn’t lack the ambition, but had no confidence in success. “I must, in candor, say that I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he wrote to a newspaper editor in April, and made the same disclaimer to another correspondent in July. Certainly his strengths were speech and debate, which would be at home in the Senate; he had none of the administrative talent or experience needed for the presidency. For the entire year, he played the role of the Republican soldier—practicing law, making occasional speeches in nearby states, and writing letters on high policy to influential Republicans. As late as November of 1859 Lincoln was still self-effacing: “For my single self, I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause, and for this object I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position.” As late as January 1860, he lacked support for a presidential try even in his home state. Many local politicians, especially in conservative southern Illinois, considered him too “liberal,” a codeword for “anti-slavery.” Others were put off by his lack of experience.
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But there was an element of craft to Lincoln’s self-imposed year in the wilderness after the debates. Maintaining, as he did during the whole of that year, that he was only looking toward another Senate try in 1864, he kept his name on the lips of the faithful while at the same time avoiding the brickbats of other presidential candidates. In fact, when he penned his November promise to “labor faithfully in the ranks,” he had already made an appointment that revealed a craving for wider recognition. In October of 1859, he had agreed to lecture on politics in New York, at Henry Ward Beecher’s famous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The venue and sponsorship of the address were changed at the last minute, and on February 27, 1860, Lincoln delivered his speech at the downtown Cooper Union for the Young Men’s Central Republican Union of New York City, with Republican kingmakers Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant giving silent benediction on the podium behind him and a large crowd of intellect and culture in front of him.
He made a shaky start. The New Yorkers whispered behind their hands when they saw his awkward manner and his ill-fitting clothes with suitcase creases still showing, and winced when they heard his shrill voice and his backwoods accent. (“Mr. Cheerman,” he began.) But over the next two hours, his eccentricities were forgotten as the power of his ideas, the weight of his logic, the lucidity of his arguments, and the fascination of his gestures and expressions, which he had practiced for years in a thousand stump speeches given from wagon beds in prairie town squares, bound them by a spell. When he thundered the final words—“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”—the fifteen hundred in attendance forgot themselves and jumped to their feet, shouted, waved their hats, and rushed the stage to shake his hand and praise him. (It was the only time New Yorkers would ever do so.) When he started the speech he had been what the New York Times called him: a lawyer of some local Illinois reputation. When he finished on that night only three months before the Republican nominating convention, Lincoln had become a presidential contender.
A poor performance at the Cooper Union so close to the convention would have killed Lincoln’s chances for the nomination. Greeley advertised the event with the prediction, “It is not probable that Mr. Lincoln will be heard again in our City this year if ever.” But, though it encouraged Lincoln and his friends in Illinois and spurred them to new efforts in the coming weeks, his spectacular showing did not have a commensurate power to vault him immediately to the prize—as witnessed by the next issue of the New York Weekly Tribune. It shuffled its account of Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech back to pages two and three. The front page was devoted to a speech by “Mr. Republican”—William H. Seward.
On February 29, Seward had delivered his speech on the floor of the Senate to packed galleries, a phalanx of congressmen, and a full corps of scribbling reporters. His intended audience was much larger, however: thirty million countrymen were eagerly awaiting an address by the acknowledged spokesman for the Republican Party. This was the first full-dress pronouncement in two years by the man who figured to be the Republican candidate, pending his formal ratification by the delegates at the Republican convention two months away. Seward’s speech was statesmanlike and eloquent. It was an olive branch to the South: a repudiation of the recent John Brown raid and a denial of any aggressive intent against slavery where it existed. Not only did the Tribune devote six first-page columns to the reprinting of Seward’s entire speech, it had already printed two hundred and fifty thousand copies of it, and was preparing a pamphlet edition of a million within the month. What Seward said was front-page news.
Since joining the Republican Party in 1855, Seward’s government experience, proven ability, political savvy, and long-time service to the free-soil cause had made him its distinguished leader. He and his partner Thurlow Weed, the New York party boss and editor of the Albany Evening Journal, were the most potent political combination since Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Together, they had made Seward governor of New York in 1838, elected him United States Senator from New York in 1849, reelected him in 1855, and lifted him into the highest echelons of national power. He had been President Zachary Taylor’s most trusted advisor in 1850, and in 1856 had snubbed the Republican presidential nomination because he didn’t think the brand-new party could win. Weed, the Stromboli who pulled the strings of a huge network of New York financial interests, had a proven record of raising slush funds. These “oceans of cash,” Republicans were told, were funds they would need in the fall election; Seward men liked to bait opponents with the question, “If you don’t nominate Seward, where will you get your money?” With the Republican convention looming in May, he was not only the first choice of his own delegate-rich New York, but also of New England and the upper tier of northern states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. All spring of 1860 Seward spoke confidently of the nomination, giving lavish parties and keeping in close
touch with his powerful, rich friends in New York. When he left Washington to go home to Auburn to await the nomination in Chicago, he told friends that he expected to return to the nation’s capital in a much higher capacity.
But the very things that made Seward strong made him weak. He had been a leading political figure for so long that he had made many enemies, and now they could be heard sharpening their knives. His strength was in the states that were probably won for the Republicans no matter who ran. The real battleground was in the lower tier of northern states that had voted Democratic four years ago: Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. If those states could be brought into the Republican column, the presidency would be theirs. And these were the states where Seward’s radical reputation was a liability, where the voters were conservative on the slavery issue. They were disturbed by the memory of his 1852 speech wherein he had disparaged the Constitution in favor of a “higher law” which declared slavery a sin, and his 1858 “irrepressible conflict” speech, which had sounded like the blast of a battle trumpet. Many in these states blamed Seward’s strident anti-slavery rhetoric for the impulse that had sent John Brown on the bloody-eyed Harpers Ferry raid that had inflamed the South the previous October. On the other hand, while Seward’s moral fervor had made him a hero to the radicals in the North, he had betrayed them by his conciliatory speeches and soothing gestures toward the South as the election neared. Seward’s coffers were swollen by shady financial deals made by his string-pulling partner, Thurlow Weed, and the stink of it offended many in the party, and would prevent them from pointing a self-righteous finger at the corrupt Buchanan administration. Also, Seward was the frontrunner, which pitted every other candidate against him.
Seward’s rivals for the nomination appeared to be three. The first was Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, the darling of the radical anti-slavery wing of the party, courageous, of spotless character and commanding presence, handsome, cultivated, intelligent, and relentlessly ambitious for the presidency. His Republican credentials had been established long before any of the other contenders—he had been among the first national leaders to identify himself with the new party when doing so was a brave act of conscience. However, he was even more radical than Seward on slavery and thus shared Seward’s difficulties in the key battleground states. He couldn’t even command the full support of the delegates from his own state.
