Writing home after the dinner, Seward joshingly noted that he “found much comfort” in the discovery that Ohio was home to at least three candidates for the presidency, “all eminent and excellent men, but each preferring anybody out of Ohio, to his two rivals within.” While Seward immediately intuited signals that Ben Wade, in particular, coveted the nomination, Chase remained oblivious, refusing to believe that Ohio would not back its most deserving son. On the Chases’ last evening in Washington, the Blairs threw them a lavish party at their country estate in Silver Spring.
As usual, Kate left a deep impression on everyone. Seward afterward told Frances that she was quite “a young lady, pleasant and well-cultivated.” Chase wrote Nettie how pleased he was that many showed “attention to Katie,” and many were “kind to me.” He returned home convinced that his trip had accomplished a great deal. “Everybody seems to like me and to feel a very gratifying degree of confidence in me,” he reported to a Cincinnati friend. Confusing hospitality with hard allegiance, he told one of his supporters that “a great change seemed to come over men’s minds while I was in Washington.”
THE BEGINNING of the pre-presidential year found the backers of Edward Bates more active in the pursuit of his nomination than the candidate himself. While Bates would gradually warm to the idea, he found himself, as always, conflicted about plunging into politics. Without the encouragement of the powerful Blairs, it is unlikely that he would have put his name forward. Once he agreed to stand, he was confronted with a political dilemma. His strength lay among old Whigs and nativists concentrated in the border states, and conservatives in the North and Northwest. To have a genuine chance for the nomination, he would have to prove himself acceptable to moderate Republicans as well.
Had he used the months prior to the nomination to travel to the very different states of Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Maryland, he might have acquainted himself with the wide range of views that comprised the new party. But he never left his home state, preferring to rely on intelligence received from colleagues and supporters who came to visit him. Not only did he keep to Missouri, he rarely left his beloved home, noting in his diary when he was forced to stay overnight in St. Louis that it was “the first that I have slept in town for about two years.” Four decades of marriage had not diminished his bond with Julia.
Secluding himself at home, Bates never developed a clear understanding of the varied constituencies that had to be aligned, a deficit that resulted in a number of missteps. While his distance from the fierce arguments of the fifties was considered beneficial to his candidacy, his long absence from politics made him less familiar with the savage polarization created by the slavery issue. In late February 1859, he answered the request of the Whig Committee of New York for his “views and opinions on the politics of the country.” The New York Whigs had passed a resolution calling for an end to agitation of “the Negro question” so that the country might focus on “topics of general importance,” such as economic development and internal improvements, that would unite rather than fracture the nation. In his letter, which was published nationwide, Bates declared that he had always considered “the Negro question” to be “a pestilent question, the agitation of which has never done good to any party, section or class, and never can do good, unless it be accounted good to stir up the angry passions of men, and exasperate the unreasoning jealousy of sections.” He believed that those who continued to press the issue, “after the sorrowful experience of the last few years,” must be motivated by “personal ambition or sectional prejudice.”
Lauded by Whigs and nativists, the letter provoked widespread criticism in Republican circles. Schuyler Colfax, who backed Bates for president, warned him that his comments “denouncing the agitation of the negro question” sounded like “a denunciation of the Rep[ublica]n party, and would turn many against [him].” Bates disagreed. “If my letter had been universally acceptable to the Republicans, that fact alone might have destroyed my prospects in two frontier slave states, Md. and Mo., and so I would have no streng[t]h at all but the Republican party,” where Seward and Chase, he knew, were far better positioned. Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis, the leading member of the American Party in the House, confirmed Bates’s views, advising him that he was poised to secure majority approval and should not attempt to further define his views—“write no more public letters—let well enough alone.”
As the new year opened, Bates believed his chances were growing “brighter every day.” Supporters in the key battleground states of Indiana and Pennsylvania assured him that large percentages of the delegates appointed to the Chicago convention were “made up of ‘Bates men.’” A visitor from Illinois told him that much “good feeling” existed in the southern part of the state, “but first (on a point of State pride,) they must support Lincoln.” This was the first time in his daily entries that Bates so much as mentioned Lincoln’s name as a presidential aspirant. In Illinois, Lincoln was keenly aware of Bates, answering an inquiring letter about how Illinois regarded the various candidates by saying that Bates “would be the best man for the South of our State, and the worst for the North of it,” while Seward was “the very best candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst for the South of it.” With amusing self-serving logic, Lincoln suggested that neither Bates nor Seward could command a majority vote in Illinois.
On the last day of February 1860, the very day of Seward’s conciliatory speech in the Senate, a great Opposition Convention comprised of Whigs and Americans met in Jefferson City, Missouri, and “enthusiastically” endorsed Bates for president. Two weeks later, Bates received a second endorsement from the Republican state convention in St. Louis. The Missouri Republicans, however, were in a carping mood, particularly the German-American contingent, which threatened to block the endorsement, still troubled by Bates’s open support for the nativist party in 1856. To satisfy both the more ardent Republicans and the German-American community, Frank Blair suggested that Bates agree to outline his positions in answer to a questionnaire drawn up by the German-American press.
The questionnaire posed a difficult problem for Bates. He had to assuage the doubts of Republicans who felt, like editor Joseph Medill of Chicago, that it was better to be “beaten with a representative man” who placed himself squarely on the Republican platform than to “triumph with a ‘Union-saver’” and “sink into the quicksands.” However, if he moved too far to the left to satisfy the passionate Republicans, he would risk his natural base among the old Whigs and Americans. Though once noted for his deft touch in harmonizing opposing forces, Bates plunged into his answers without calculating the consequences.
Asked to render his opinions on the extension of slavery into the territories, he announced that Congress had the power to decide the issue, a position that directly contradicted the Dred Scott decision. He felt, moreover, that “the spirit and the policy of the Government ought to be against its extension.” He advocated equal constitutional rights for all citizens, native-born or naturalized, claiming to endorse “no distinctions among Americans citizens,” and adding that the “Government is bound to protect all the citizens in the enjoyment of all their rights every where.” Beyond this, he favored colonizing former slaves in Africa and Central America, a Homestead Act, a Pacific Railroad, and the admission of Kansas as a free state.
His statement met with approval in traditional Republican enclaves in the Northeast and Northwest, but in the border states, where his advantage was supposed to reside, it proved disastrous. The Lexington [Missouri] Express wrote that the published letter came “as a clap of thunder from a clear sky,” placing Bates so blatantly in the Black Republican camp that he should no longer expect support from the more conservative border states. By subscribing to every article of the Republican creed, the Louisville Journal complained, Bates became “just as good or bad a Republican as Seward, Chase or Lincoln is…. He has by a single blow severed every tie of confidence or sympathy wh
ich connected him with the Southern Conservatives.” Only four years earlier, the Memphis Bulletin observed, Bates had denounced Black Republicans as “agitators,” labeling them “dangerous enemies to the peace of our Union.” Now he had become one of them. Bates himself recognized the backlash his letter had created, lamenting “the simultaneous abandonment of me by a good many papers” in the border states.
The attempt to pacify the anxious German-Americans had diminished his hold on what should have been his natural base, without bringing a commensurate number of Republicans to his side. Though the Bates camp maintained faith that their man was bound to win the nomination, Bates confided in his diary that “knowing the fickleness of popular favor, and on what small things great events depend, I shall take care not so to set my heart upon the glittering bauble, as to be mortified or made at all unhappy by a failure.”
NOT HINDERED by the hubris, delusions, and inconsistencies that plagued his three chief rivals, Abraham Lincoln gained steady ground through a combination of hard work, skill, and luck. While Seward and Bates felt compelled in the final months to reposition themselves toward the center of the party, Lincoln never changed his basic stance. He could remain where he had always been, “neither on the left wing nor the right, but very close to dead center,” as Don Fehrenbacher writes. From the time he had first spoken out against the extension of slavery into the territories in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln had insisted that while the spread of slavery must be “fairly headed off,” he had no wish “to interfere with slavery” where it already existed. So long as the institution was contained, which Lincoln considered a sacred pledge, it was “in course of ultimate extinction.” This position represented perfectly the views of the moderate majority in the Republican Party.
Though a successful bid for the nomination remained unlikely, a viable candidacy was no longer an impossible dream. Slowly and methodically, Lincoln set out to improve his long odds. He arranged to publish his debates with Douglas in a book that was read widely by Republicans. As more and more people became familiar with him through the newspaper stories of the debates, invitations to speak at Republican gatherings began to pour in. Not yet an avowed candidate, Lincoln delivered nearly two dozen speeches in Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas in the four months between August and December 1859.
While Seward was still touring Europe and the Middle East, Lincoln was introducing himself to tens of thousands of Westerners. “I think it is a mistake,” a leading New Yorker wrote Lincoln, “that Senator Seward is not on his own battlefield, instead of being in Egypt surveying the route of an old Underground Rail Road, over which Moses took, one day, a whole nation, from bondage into Liberty.” Lincoln capitalized on Seward’s absence. The crowds that greeted him grew with every stop along the way. Most of his audiences had never laid eyes on him, and he invariably forged an indelible impression. Once he began speaking, the Janesville Gazette reported, “the high order of [his] intellect” left a permanent impact upon his listeners, who would remember his “tall, gaunt form” and “his points and his hits” for “many a day.”
Speaking not as a candidate but as an advocate for the Republican cause, Lincoln sharpened his attacks on the Democrats and, in particular, on the party’s front-runner, Stephen Douglas, who preceded him at many of the same locations. “Douglasism,” he wrote Chase, “is all which now stands in the way of an early and complete success of Republicanism.” In this way, ironically, Douglas’s national reputation continually increased the attention paid to Lincoln.
Perhaps Lincoln’s most rewarding stop was Cincinnati, which he had vowed never again to visit after the humiliating Reaper trial. This time, he was “greeted with the thunder of cannon, the strains of martial music, and the joyous plaudits of thousands of citizens thronging the streets.” He arrived at the Burnet House and was put up “in princely style,” delighted to find that the most prominent of Cincinnati’s residents were vying to meet the “rising star.”
Lincoln addressed the Southern threats that the election of a Republican president would divide the Union, directing his remarks particularly to the many Kentuckians who had crossed the Ohio River to listen to him. “Will you make war upon us and kill us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a good cause, man for man, as any other people living…but, man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. You will never make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I think that you could whip us; if we were equal it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to master us.” The next day, his speech was described in the Cincinnati Gazette “as an effort remarkable for its clear statement, powerful argument and massive common sense,” and possessed of “such dignity and power as to have impressed some of our ablest lawyers with the conclusion that it was superior to any political effort they had ever heard.”
Lincoln’s crowded schedule allowed him no time to accept Joshua Speed’s invitation to visit him in Kentucky for the opening of the national racecourse, “when,” his old friend promised, “we expect to have some of the best horses in America to compete for the purses. In addition we think we can show the prettiest women,” adding, “if you are not too old to enjoy either the speed of the horses or the beauty of the women come.” If his speaking tour caused Lincoln to forgo speedy horses and beautiful women, it greatly increased his stature among western Republicans. “Your visit to Ohio has excited an extensive interest in your favor,” former congressman Samuel Galloway told him. “We must take some man not hitherto corrupted with the discussion upon Candidates. Your name has been again and again mentioned…. I am candid to say you are my choice.”
Rapidly becoming a national spokesman for the fledgling Republican Party, Lincoln sought to preserve the unity of the still-fragile coalition. He wished, he wrote Schuyler Colfax, “to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks.” An anti-immigrant movement in Massachusetts “failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole North-West,” while attempts in both Ohio and New Hampshire to thwart enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law might “utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the constitution itself…. In a word, in every locality we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.”
Colfax appreciated Lincoln’s “kind & timely note,” which underscored the need to enlist in the Republican cause “men of all shades & gradations of opinion from the Conservative…to the bold radical.” To be victorious in 1860, he wrote, “we must either win this Conservative sentiment, with its kindred sympathizers, represented under the title of North Americans, Old Line Whigs &c, to our banners” without alienating the radicals, “or by repelling them must go into the contest looking for defeat.” In this cause of unity, Colfax assured Lincoln, “your counsel carries great weight…there is no political letter that falls from your pen, which is not copied throughout the Union.” Lincoln’s ability to bridge these divisions would prove of vital importance to his campaign.
On October 16, 1859, as Lincoln prepared for a trip to Kansas, the remaining bonds of union were strained almost to the point of rupture when the white abolitionist John Brown came to Virginia, in the words of Stephen Vincent Benét, “with foolish pikes/And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.” Brown and his band of thirteen white men and five blacks seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry with a bold but ill-conceived plan of provoking a slave insurrection. The arsenal was swiftly recaptured and Brown taken prisoner by a federal force under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, accompanied by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.
Brown was tried and sentenced to death. “I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind, & cheerfulness,” Brown wrote his family, “feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance
the cause of God; & of humanity.” In the month between the sentence and his hanging, the dignity and courage of his conduct and the eloquence of his statements and letters made John Brown a martyr/hero to many in the antislavery North. His death, when it came, was mourned by public assemblies throughout the Northern states. “Church bells tolled,” the historian David Potter writes, “black bunting was hung out, minute guns were fired, prayer meetings assembled, and memorial resolutions were adopted.”
Brown’s motivations, psychological profile, and strategy would be probed by historians, poets, and novelists for generations. The immediate impact of the intrepid raid, which “sent a shiver of fear to the inmost fiber of every white man, woman, and child” in the South, was unmistakable. While antislavery fervor in the North was intensified, Southern solidarity and rhetoric reached a new level of zealotry. “Harper’s Ferry,” wrote the Richmond Enquirer, “coupled with the expression of Northern sentiment in support…have shaken and disrupted all regard for the Union; and there are but few men who do not look to a certain and not distant day when dissolution must ensue.” The raid at Harpers Ferry, one historian notes, was “like a great meteor disclosing in its lurid flash the width and depth of that abyss,” which cut the nation in two. Herman Melville, in his poem “The Portent,” would use the same metaphor, calling “Weird John Brown/ The meteor of the war”—the tail of his long beard trailing out from under the executioner’s cap.
Throughout the South, heightened fear of slave insurrection led to severe restrictions on the expression of antislavery sentiments. “I do not exaggerate in designating the present state of affairs in the Southern country as a reign of terror,” the British consul in Charleston wrote. “Persons are torn away from their residences and pursuits…letters are opened at the Post Offices; discussion upon slavery is entirely prohibited under penalty of expulsion…. The Northern merchants and Travellers are leaving in great numbers.” In Norfolk, Virginia, the St. Louis News reported, a grand jury indicted a merchant “for seditious language, because he declared that John Brown was a good man, fighting in a good cause.”
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