by Larry Tagg
Perhaps more dangerous was Edward Bates of Missouri. Bates had the endorsement of the second most famous Republican, Horace Greeley, who was bitterly anti-Seward. Besides his personal antipathy to Seward, Greeley backed Bates because the latter was a Southern anti-slavery man, which made him popular in the Border States, not only the northern tier of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, but also the southern tier of Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina; he could get votes in the South as well as the North, and if he won the election, he would be the Republican most likely to keep the Deep South in the Union. But personally Bates was a cold fish. He excited no one. He had given all his recent years to legal work, he hadn’t held office for twenty-five years, and he was little known in the East. He had supported the immigrant-bashing Know-Nothing Party in 1856, and was distrusted by the foreign elements in the party, particularly the Germans, who were needed to carry the Northwest. Bates’ weaknesses were a mirror image of Seward’s: he would run poorly in the most ardently Republican states, who saw him as a limp middle-of-the-roader. They pointed out that he had never even declared himself a Republican—Bates still called himself a Whig.
Neither could Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania be overlooked. He was a bare-knuckles machine boss, and he had the initial support of the immensely influential New York Herald, delegates from his own state, and tariff backers across the North. But his weakness was known to everybody: he had the morals of a pit viper. He summed up his ethics when he said, “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”
So obscure was Lincoln as the convention approached that pundits still failed to include him on their lists of the top seven, or dozen, or twenty-one, or thirty-four hopeful candidates. Many Republican newspapers, including the New York Times, still misspelled his name “Abram” when they did mention him. An engraving of Republican nominees published in Harper’s magazine in the days before the convention showed a large oval portrait of Seward in the center, pictured above the public buildings of Washington, D.C., where he would presumably soon be directing the government. Ten smaller portraits of the other hopefuls surrounded Seward’s portrait, much like the court of the king. Inconspicuous among the ten, in the lower left, was Abraham Lincoln.
But in Lincoln’s time, anything could happen at a convention. Although he was inconspicuous and unlikely, Lincoln’s candidacy would be aided by the rules of the political game as it was practiced in the Age of Jackson.
* * *
It is interesting that in the drama of Lincoln’s skyrocket rise from anonymous prairie lawyer to President of the United States in the six months between the conventions of May and the election of November of 1860, Lincoln himself was not on-stage. According to the campaign etiquette of the time, before the climax the hero must be snatched from view and hustled away into the wings. It is interesting that in an era of no-holds-barred political brawling, Americans were fastidious about this one item of decorum. They insisted that the candidates themselves strike a pose of disinterest during the maddest of the nationwide tumult and remain at home, sitting in their living rooms drinking tea quietly with little fingers extended, appearing not to seek the prize, but letting the honor come to them, if it did come, as if by surprise.
This being the fashion, the action during Lincoln’s rise was taken up entirely by his friends, a brilliant group of Illinois jurists and newspapermen, all the more dangerous because they were overlooked and underrated by the smug eastern party bosses. They included Judge David Davis, the bull-necked, three-hundred pound leading figure of Lincoln’s central Illinois eighth circuit; Norman B. Judd, a Chicago lawyer, railroad official, and Illinois Republican Chairman; and Charles H. Ray and Joseph Medill, the co-editors of the Chicago Tribune.
Lincoln’s obscurity was essential to the first, crucial trick taken by his managers. In December of 1859, six months before the convention, the Republican National Committee met in New York to decide on the site for the party convention. Several cities were favored, most prominently St. Louis, home of rising candidate Edward Bates. Lincoln’s man Norman Judd, who represented Illinois at the meeting, suggested Chicago, a city evocative of Republican fast-growing strength and go-ahead spirit. In addition, Judd said with the studied casualness of a veteran political poker player, it would be neutral, since Illinois had no candidate of her own. Heads nodded. In a show of hands, the Windy City was chosen as the convention site by one vote—Judd’s own.
With just one week to go until the Chicago convention, Lincoln was still promised no votes at all. The next crucial coup, then, was for him to somehow gain the votes of all the Illinois delegates at the state Republican convention held in Decatur on May 9 and 10—a hard trick to pull off, since politically Illinois was two states: upstate Illinois, settled by emigrants from the northeast, anti-slavery in their views and pulling for Seward; and downstate Illinois—nicknamed “Egypt” for its political makeup so foreign to the northern counties, with Cairo its largest city—settled by Southerners, indifferent to slavery and leaning toward Bates. In February, Lincoln, still seeing himself as a candidate for the Senate in 1864, had penned a pessimistic letter to Judd concerning the Illinois delegation. Speaking of his senatorial chances, he wrote, “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 not to get the Illinois delegates.” Judd’s strategy was for Lincoln not to divide the already divided delegation by trying to cajole the delegates one by one, but rather to insist on a convention rule that all the delegates vote as a bloc, and trust state pride to compel the delegates to fall in behind it.
Lincoln was lucky in the location of the state convention. Decatur was in his base, the middle of the state. It had been his home, it was in the Eighth Circuit he had worn smooth in his many years as a lawyer, and the town was eager to cheer him. Lincoln’s friends had their strategy well planned. On the first day of the convention, Lincoln called attention to himself with a late entrance, and received a tumultuous welcome by the three-thousand-strong hometown crowd, who hoisted him and propelled him over their heads, hand over hand, to a seat on the platform. As the shouting died down, his friend, Decatur politician Richard Oglesby, stood up and announced that he wished to offer Lincoln a contribution. The multitude, still on their feet, roared their approval, and, from the rear of the hall, down the center aisle came Lincoln’s country cousin, bearded old John Hanks, carrying two weather-beaten fence rails festooned with American flags and a great banner that proclaimed:
Abraham Lincoln. The Rail Candidate For President in 1860. Two Rails From a Lot of 3,000 Made in 1830 by Thos. Hanks and Abe Lincoln—Whose Father Was the First Pioneer of Macon County.
Seeing this, the crowd broke into pandemonium. Grown men made such a roar, surged forward in so irresistible a tide, and threw so many hats, canes, and newspapers into the air that part of the improvised canvas roof of the hall collapsed. After fifteen full minutes of barely controlled riot, the wreckage was cleared away and Lincoln rose slowly to speak. These may or may not be his own rails, he said, but surely he had made many better ones! The crowd roared again, and he sat down. Oglesby’s and Hanks’ two rough fence rails had conjured a vivid, stirring, homespun image of “the Railsplitter,” one that would remind voters of frontier winners like “Old Hickory” and “Tippecanoe.” (It was ironic that two country rails were the levers that would lift Lincoln into the White House. Lincoln himself had only distaste for his humble origins. He disliked manual labor and had left it behind as quickly as he could.) The next day, the three hundred local delegates—the Seward men and the Bates men—were compelled to vote “aye” when a Lincoln man introduced these instructions: “That Abraham Lincoln is the choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and the delegates from this State are instructed to use all honorable means to secure his nomination by the Chicago convention, and to vote as a unit for him.” Thus did Lincoln’s friends not only insure that he would be put
in nomination on the floor at Chicago, but that the twenty-two Illinois delegates to Chicago would be solid for him.
* * *
Before the echoes of the cheers in Decatur had died away, crowds began gathering for the main event on the shore of Lake Michigan 150 miles to the north. Seward’s managers arrived in Chicago on a special train, accompanied by thirteen carloads of convention delegates and boisterous revelers hand-picked for their booming voices. They brought along a brilliantly uniformed marching band with epaulets shimmering on their shoulders and white and scarlet feathers waving from their caps, and were joined by large contingents from Michigan and Wisconsin. Simon Cameron’s handlers detrained with almost four hundred Pennsylvanian roustabouts, plus two bands for extra volume. St. Louis trains belched forth crowds of Bates’ boosters.
But they were all dwarfed by the combined lung-power of the Lincoln enthusiasts. Norman Judd, the railroad man, had again proved the master of every contingency. Anticipating large imported cheering sections for the other candidates, his latest ploy would reduce their throatiest efforts to a seeming whisper. He had arranged for Illinois railroads to offer special discounts to the teeming thousands from all over the state who wished to come, to shout down the foreigners and to raise the roof for the Illinois man, the Railsplitter. Judd had gotten the word out, and it was estimated that forty thousand were surging around the convention hall as May 16, the first day of the convention, approached.
Now the Chicago newspapermen went to work. Two days before the convention, the gathered delegates woke up in their hotel rooms, opened Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune, and read the headline: “The Winning Man, Abraham Lincoln,” followed by a three-foot-long column of editorial superlatives, giving eight reasons why he should be named. (The first reason was that he had no record, and therefore “He will enter the contest with no clogs, no embarrassment.”) The next day, the paper ran the same editorial again. The Tribune was capped on the morning of the third, decisive day of balloting by the headline “The Last Entreaty,” summarizing once again the arguments for Lincoln.
Given that Lincoln’s profile was hazy for most of the delegates, his strength lay in the fact that no one made “any positive objection” to him. He had no history, so nothing he had said or done had offended anybody—a rare asset among politicians after the bitterness and violence of the slavery-torn 1850s. The political map of the free states was not unlike the map of Illinois: anti-slavery men to the north, conservatives to the south. As before, Lincoln would stake out the middle, and be the man to whom all could finally come. If it would be triumph, it would be the triumph of “availability.” He wrote his strategy to a friend in Ohio in March: “My name is new in the field; and I suppose I am not the first choice of a very great many. Our policy, then, is to give no offence to others—leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.” His managers would concentrate on the delegates of the southern tier of free states, conservative states which had gone Democratic in 1856. These—Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, along with Illinois—were the states everyone recognized as necessary to a Republican victory in November. One Iowa delegate, Fitz-Henry Warren, put the search for the “available” candidate memorably: “I am for the man who can carry Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Indiana, with this reservation, that I will not go into cemetery or catacomb; the candidate must be alive, and able to walk at least from parlor to dining room.”
Judge Davis, Norman Judd, and the rest of Lincoln’s managers, fresh from Decatur, arrived in Chicago in the days before the convention and set up headquarters at the city’s finest hotel, the Tremont House. Soon they were busy testing the wind in the chatter and the whisper of political secrets, raising toasts and laughing with the men in the doubtful delegations, and saying Lincoln’s name in a hundred little groups and a thousand confidential conversations. Everything turned on whether Seward could win. By the morning of the convention’s first day, Cincinnati Commercial reporter Murat Halstead reported that, among the stop-Seward forces, the celebrities were already shaken out: “The Bates movement, the McLean movement, the Cameron movement, the Banks movement, are all nowhere. They had gone down like lead in the mighty waters.” All who had national reputations were victims of those reputations. The man who had none, who lacked enough prominence to be marked either as a conservative or a radical, the lawyer who had not set foot in Washington for more than a decade, was the coming man.
When the gavel came down on Wednesday, May 16, it silenced the expectant crackle and hum of the largest political gathering in the nation’s history. The first day was prelude, given to the routine business of organization. Halstead wrote that the favorite word was “solemn”; “there is something every ten minutes found to be solemn.” The oratory of the second day, devoted to the adoption of the party platform before a crowd even more tightly packed than the day before, sounded the crescendo to what was expected to be the climax in the evening: the nomination of William Seward as Republican candidate for president.
The Seward men were confident of a landslide. The auguries were all brilliant. Informal polls of passengers on trains converging on Chicago had indicated a lock for the front-runner: one train was 127 for Seward, 44 for all others combined; on another, it was 210 for Seward with 30 against; even the train from nearby Milwaukee had been 368 for Seward, 93 for Lincoln, 46 for all others. The delegates seemed ready to vote in the same proportions. A first-day motion by the stop-Seward men aimed at disadvantaging him with a voting rule had been easily defeated, 358 to 94. A straw poll that very afternoon indicated that Seward still had the votes.
The finished platform was adopted unanimously about six o’clock in the evening to “intense enthusiasm. … A herd of buffaloes or lions could not have made a more tremendous roaring,” wrote Halstead. Seward’s moment had arrived. Halstead reported, “So confident were the Seward men, when the platform was adopted, of their ability to nominate their great leader, that they urged an immediate ballot, and would have had it if the clerks had not reported that they were unable to proceed—they had no tally sheets. The cheering of the thousands of spectators during the day indicated that a very large share of the outside pressure was for Seward. There is something almost irresistible here in the prestige of his fame.” But the tally sheets did not arrive. There was confusion. Some cried, “Ballot, ballot!” But it was the dinner hour, and a motion to adjourn was also heard. Above the hubbub, conventioneers saw the chairman bring down his gavel. The huge doors swung open, and the throng of ten thousand poured out into the Chicago streets. Thus, abruptly, was the second day ended.
For want of the tally sheets, the nomination was lost.
* * *
For on that night, as the popping corks of three hundred bottles of champagne punctuated the easy laughter in the rooms of the Seward men, the Lincoln men were sleeplessly at work, talking urgently with delegates, singly and in groups, going from hotel to hotel, floor to floor, room to room. The stop-Seward movement had been doomed without a consensus candidate, and as late as Thursday night there was none—the votes of the “battleground states” of the lower North were promised to a half dozen men. Just before midnight, in fact, Horace Greeley, Seward’s bitterest foe, sent a telegram to his Tribune office: “My conclusion from all that I can gather to-night is that the opposition to Governor Seward cannot concentrate on any candidate and that he will be nominated!”
But the Lincoln men had captured an important prize: the delegation of Illinois’ neighbor and political twin, Indiana. The Hoosier State’s twenty-six delegates had not been promised to a native son. Moreover, the Republican candidate for governor in Indiana, Henry S. Lane, was convinced that he would go down to defeat if forced to ride Seward’s radical anti-slavery coattails. That left either Lincoln or Bates. Huddling in caucus, the Hoosier delegates heard Gustave Koerner, a pro-Lincoln German, remind them that German voters had promised to bolt the party en masse if Bates, who had an anti-immigrant record, was chosen
. He reminded them that the German immigrants were strongly anti-slavery, and a Bates nomination would seem to them a retreat from Republican principles. Needing the strong German vote, the Indiana delegates agreed to vote unanimously for Lincoln on the first ballot.
With Illinois and Indiana already for Lincoln, the Pennsylvania delegates, fifty-six strong, were suddenly ready to consider him. The Pennsylvanians were promised to their favorite son, Simon Cameron, on the first ballot. By now, however, it had become obvious that Cameron, with his lingering stain of corruption and no support outside his state, had no chance at the nomination. Andrew Curtin, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, had the same objection to Seward as Lane of Indiana—with so many conservative Pennsylvania voters, Curtin would be defeated if Seward headed the ticket. The Pennsylvanians, like the Indianans, next considered Bates, and again Koerner spoke against Bates on behalf of the Germans, the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” who were even more numerous in Pennsylvania than in Indiana. The Keystone State delegates now leaned toward the Illinoisan. Finally, word came back that Cameron would yield his delegates to Lincoln on the second ballot with a quid pro quo: Cameron must be promised the Treasury post in a Lincoln cabinet. The offer was telegraphed to Lincoln in Springfield. The stiff-backed Lincoln replied immediately with a rebuke: “I authorize no bargains and will be bound by none.” But Judge Davis, the soldier with boots on the ground in Chicago, brushed off Lincoln’s for-the-record wire. “Lincoln ain’t here, and don’t know what we have to meet, so we will go ahead as if we hadn’t heard from him, and he must ratify it,” he told the team. About midnight, Judge Davis tottered sleepily down the stairs of the Tremont House after meeting with the Pennsylvanians and told Joseph Medill, “Damned if we haven’t got them.” “How?” asked Medill. “By paying their price,” Davis answered.
