by Bruce Catton
This convention denounced most political-party platforms as frauds, and adopted one of its own which was commendably brief and unassailable: it declared simply for the Constitution, the Union, and enforcement of the laws. Then, having nominated Mr. Bell, and having named the distinguished orator, Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, for Vice-President, it adjourned. It had not so much as mentioned slavery in the territories or the fugitive slave laws, and even John Brown had been referred to only twice, in passing. This was mostly a convention of old men, past their time but trying stoutly to work things out so that young men would not have to die in the years just ahead, and it represented a good deal of strength in the border states, where slavery existed on a softer basis than in the cotton South, and where men could occasionally argue about it without wanting to destroy one another. Actually, this convention was all but openly seeking an election that would be settled in Congress (where compromise might yet prevail), and Northern politicians noted that it would inevitably get many votes from members of the dying Know-Nothing party, who expressed their own deep fear of the advance of the nineteenth century by opposing the foreign-born and the Catholic rather than by running a temperature over slavery. This group could win no election itself, but it might keep other people from winning. Its existence would affect what was going to happen in Chicago.2
So would Chicago itself. Despite the enthusiasm it had displayed, Charleston had been somewhat dignified and aloof, and Chicago never dreamed of being either of those things. The mere fact that the convention was being held here was evidence that western America had blown off the lid. As a city, Chicago was hardly a quarter-century old. Ten years ago it had been a raw frontier town of fewer than 30,000 inhabitants; it had more than 100,000 now, and although it remained raw, it was expansive, vibrant, explosively aware that to be the central city of the Northwest was somehow to be at the very hub of America. Just as the atmosphere of Charleston had had its influence on what the Democrats did there, so Chicago’s own atmosphere would shape what the Republicans would do. The party was new and the city was new, and each was growing too fast, and was too enthusiastic about its own growth to worry very much about restraint or dignified behavior.
The delegates would meet in a specially built auditorium—a sprawling two-story affair of lumber known as the Wigwam, measuring 180 feet along one side and 100 feet along the other. It had not been in existence when April began, but it was there now, built in six weeks at surprisingly moderate cost, with the area for the delegates laid out like an enormous stage, a series of spaces for spectators rising upward all about it, a gallery running around three sides. Nobody really knew how many people could be jammed into the place; estimates ranged from 6000 to more than double that number. Pillars were decorated with tinder-dry evergreen boughs, red, white, and blue streamers ran everywhere, and the hall was brilliantly lighted by flaring gas jets; all in all, the Wigwam must have been one of the most dangerous fire traps ever built in America. For the first time, the press gallery was provided with on-the-spot telegraph instruments. Never before had so many reporters tried to cover a convention: the press gallery, big as it was, did not have nearly enough room. More than 900 reporters applied for seats in a space designed to hold sixty.3
It was believed that the convention had brought in 25,000 visitors. Chicago contained forty-two hotels, and all of them seemed to be jammed; one observer with a taste for odd statistics learned, or at least estimated, that fully 130 people, unable to rent better resting places, were sleeping on tables in the various hotel billiard rooms. On the Monday and Tuesday just before the opening day of May 16, there were incessant parades along Michigan Avenue, as special trains deposited state delegations and cheering crowds of the curious and the hangers-on. Battalions of Wide-Awakes, the party’s new marching clubs, flourishing torches and banners, tramped to and from the lake-front depot while brass bands played and enthusiastic Chicagoans set off rockets from the tops of buildings. Just as at Charleston, the henchmen who came along with the New York delegation struck the host city as rather uncouth; one dazed witness wrote that “they can drink more whiskey, swear as loud and long, sing as bad songs and get up and howl as ferociously as any crowd of Democrats you ever heard.”4 Before the convention ended, it would develop that Chicago could produce enthusiasts quite as noisy.
One thing was clear to everybody: Senator Seward was the man to beat. He was the country’s best-known Republican, the man with more delegates than anyone else had, and his campaign manager, wily Thurlow Weed, of Albany, knew all of the devious ways of politics and wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything in the world, to see Seward become President. Weed was installed in a suite at the Richmond House, holding day-long receptions for delegates who dropped in, or were brought in, to be cultivated, his aides busy everywhere. They were a mixture, these Weed-Seward headquarters men; among them were sluggers like Tom Hyer, the professional pugilist, solid men of commerce, such as Moses H. Grinnell, men of letters, like George W. Curtis—all of them, whatever they were doing, wearing an air of bright confidence. (One wag went so far as to pin a Seward badge, gaudy with the candidate’s name and likeness, on the back of Horace Greeley, the distinguished New York editor who wanted Seward beaten as poignantly as Weed wanted him nominated.) Their confidence was reasonable. The convention would cast 465 votes, and a simple majority, 233, would bring the nomination. Seward would certainly get close to 175 on the first ballot, and it seemed likely that the momentum of enthusiasm (aided by loud noises from the galleries) could send him on to victory.5
The trouble with being the man to beat is that everybody else tries to beat you. This was especially true at Chicago, where all men knew that with reasonable luck this convention would name the next President; the awareness of approaching victory pressed men here just as forebodings of defeat had pressed men at Charleston. The man who attached himself to the winner could expect to be rewarded. The party faithful wanted to listen to The Word, but as necessitous human beings they were also intensely concerned with the eventual division of the loaves and fishes. There was an especial point to this because the party itself was so new; it had never distributed national patronage before, and it was developing an immense appetite for it. Furthermore, this appetite was concentrated in the Northern section of the country, which meant that the chosen candidate’s capacity to win votes could have an equally narrow focus. Only five of the fifteen slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—were represented here. The Democrats had painstakingly examined each candidate’s record to see whether his orthodoxy could meet every test; the Republicans were examining records to find the man who could most surely carry the North and thus win a majority in the electoral college. Nobody was going to take anything for granted.
Senator Seward’s position was weaker than either he or Weed realized, and there were in Chicago men who had diagnosed its weaknesses and were working, literally without sleep, to exploit them. The most effective of these were buzzing in and out of a set of rooms at the Tremont Hotel, where a fat down-state lawyer, Judge David Davis, had set up headquarters for Abraham Lincoln.
Davis had known Lincoln ever since the old circuit-riding days, and when Long John Wentworth, the Republican mayor of Chicago, advised Lincoln that “you ought to have a feller to run you like Seward has Weed,” Lincoln had chosen Davis. Never noted as a trial lawyer, and almost wholly lacking in the ability to make a good stump speech, Davis was a thorough man, a hard worker, careful about details, a good organizer and behind-the-scenes executive, and he was about to demonstrate that his political instincts were alert and sensitive. He had gathered together an able group of co-workers. Among them were such men as Leonard Swett, of Bloomington, State Auditor Jesse Dubois, Judge Stephen Logan, who used to be Lincoln’s law partner, Norman Judd, the railroad lawyer and political leader who had arranged the Lincoln-Douglas debates, hard-fisted Ward Lamon, of Springfield, and the two canny editors of the Chicago Tribune, Charles Ray and Joseph Medill. Th
eir first job now was to survey the field and see what this race was really like.6
Aside from Seward the principal candidates were Governor Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, Judge Edward Bates, of St. Louis, Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, and of course Lincoln himself. Chase was a famous anti-slavery leader: a little too much so, perhaps, for a new party that was going to have to draw some support from the Northern Democrats. Chase had lofty hopes, and yet he was not quite making a campaign of it; he was merely standing off stage, full of dignity and rectitude, willing to receive whatever might be given to him, but not equipped with the guides and beaters needed by a man who hoped to penetrate a jungle like this one at the Wigwam. Bates had the important backing of the famous Blair family and he came from a border state, which was in his favor. If the convention should try to placate the South (which was somewhat unlikely), Bates would be a very likely choice. He had, however, presided over the national convention of the Know-Nothings in 1856 and he would be a loser in any state where the German or other foreign-born vote was essential. Cameron was a typical political boss who could hardly hope to carry anything except his own state of Pennsylvania.
Then there was Lincoln, and Davis and his aides were hard at work reminding people of him. Mayor Wentworth had warned Lincoln to “look out for prominence.” The convention would eventually realize, Wentworth said, that a really prominent candidate could not be chosen; then the man who had avoided prominence would have his chance.7 Now the Lincoln managers were trying as hard as they could to keep their man out of the limelight and at the same time set men thinking about him; he was a dark horse and for the moment he must stay dark, but he must never become so dark as to be lost to view. The job called for expert handling.
Expert handling it was getting. The immediate problem was to line up as many second-choice votes as possible, to cultivate friendships everywhere, and to get accurate, hour-by-hour knowledge of the shifting political currents among the delegates. Nothing could be done, of course, with a delegation like that of New York, where Weed had everything under control, but if there was the slightest doubt as to where a state’s votes would finally land, Davis had one or more aides attached, full time, to that state’s delegation.
This involved some intensely practical considerations. If an important politician led his delegation to a candidate and so made that candidate a winner, he would expect to be rewarded for it, in the essential currency of politics—jobs, patronage, a say in the inner councils. Before this convention week began, Dr. Charles Ray, senior editor of the Chicago Tribune, had written a “profoundly private” letter to Lincoln pointing out that “you need a few trusty friends here to say words for you that may be necessary to be said,” and urging that the principal managers at Chicago be properly empowered. “A pledge or two,” Ray reminded him, “may be necessary when the pinch comes.” Lincoln, who had been around politics long enough to know what can happen to a candidate who puts himself unrestrictedly in the hands of his managers, refused to take this bait, writing in return: “Make no contracts that will bind me.” Davis and his co-workers would have to do the best they could with promises of their own. They felt their prospects were good, and on May 15 Davis telegraphed Lincoln that “nothing will beat us but old fogy politicians the heart of the delegates are with us.”8
Down-to-earth problems were not overlooked. The men of the 1860s lived in what are now assumed to be innocent years, but they knew as much as anyone needs to know about the creation and manipulation of mass enthusiasm, and with the primitive means at their disposal they got excellent results. It became evident, for instance, that in the immense pro-Seward entourage that had come on from New York there were hundreds of men who had been brought to Chicago simply because they could yell very loudly. Properly spotted about the Wigwam under orders to stand up and cheer whenever Seward’s name was mentioned, these might make uncertain delegates believe that enthusiasm for Seward was sweeping the convention, and the Seward band wagon might thus begin to roll irresistibly. Lincoln needed his own shouters, and the headquarters group at the Tremont Hotel saw to it that he got them.
As Congressman Isaac Arnold remembered afterward: “There was then living in Chicago a man whose voice could drown the roar of Lake Michigan in its wildest fury; nay, it was said that his shout could be heard, on a calm day, across that lake.” And there was another man, who lived down on the Illinois River, whose remarkable voice had equal range and carrying qualities; he unfortunately was a Democrat, but he seems to have been malleable and he was asked to take the first train to Chicago. These two, then, the man from Chicago and the down-state Democrat, were told to bring together a group of huskies and take station on opposite sides of the Wigwam. When a key member of the Illinois delegation should take out his handkerchief, each man was to yell as hard as he could, his huskies yelling with him, and the yelling was to continue until the handkerchief vanished. As a matter of pride, Illinois would not let its favorite son be out-shouted.9
The convention would generate its own intensity. Vast as the Wigwam was, it could hold but a fraction of the crowd that wanted to get in. Long before the main gates were thrown open, at noon on Wednesday, May 16, the galleries were filled to capacity—3000 persons. The rule here was that only gentlemen accompanied by ladies could be admitted, and ladies were greatly in demand; schoolgirls, it was said, were paid twenty-five cents apiece to help male spectators get by the gatemen, and Halstead reported that certain women of the town plied a brisk if honest business along the same line. One hopeful man found an Indian woman who, at a sidewalk stand, was selling moccasins or some such artifacts to the visitors, and tried to escort her in—failing, when an official lacking in gallantry ruled that she was no lady.… When the three 20-foot doors giving access to the convention floor were opened, a dense crush of men came powering into the hall—delegates, alternates, and newspapermen mixed with spectators.10
In the various delegations were men whose names were now or soon would be nationally famous. Thaddeus Stevens went limping to his place with the Pennsylvanians, and Gideon Welles, his wig a poor match for his voluminous whiskers, led the delegation from Connecticut. John A. Andrew, who would be war governor of his state, led the Massachusetts delegation, and the Wisconsin group was headed by the tense, black-bearded German, Carl Schurz; the immense Davis lounged at ease under the Illinois standard, and William Evarts, a lawyer and orator of national reputation, took his seat as chairman of the New York contingent, expecting to see the nomination go to Seward without delay once the balloting began.
There would be no balloting, however, for two days, and this opening session was an anti-climax. The convention got itself organized, named committees, listened to an anti-slavery speech by the David Wilmot whose famous proviso had touched off so much trouble in Congress after the Mexican War, installed George Ashmun, of Massachusetts, as its president, listened to more oratory, and then adjourned early, one reason for adjournment being the fact that the Chicago Board of Trade, with four steamboats at the water front, was offering all hands a short excursion on Lake Michigan. Some delegates and visitors accepted this invitation. Others returned to the Wigwam to watch an exhibition drill by a corps of Zouaves; and the rest strolled about, visited bars, gathered in hotel rooms for argument, for song, for cards, or for private drinking, and in general disposed of the evening in the way traditional at political conventions.11 The air of pent-up excitement increased, and on Thursday—the day when the convention would hear the report of its platform committee—it began to break loose.
The Seward contingent met that morning in front of Richmond House and paraded straight to the Wigwam, all of the men wearing huge badges, a uniformed band in front blaring away at a popular air—“Oh Isn’t He a Darling?” Inside the hall, the immense crowd greeted the report of the platform committee with wild shouts, interrupting at almost every paragraph to cheer the statement of the party’s creed.
The platform had been drawn up so as to please all Republicans, and it met this des
ire precisely. It began by asserting that conditions in America made the Republican party a necessity, and it went on to endorse the Declaration of Independence, with especial reference to the part about all men being created equal. It demanded preservation of the Constitution, the rights of the several states and the Federal Union, drawing attention to the fact that all of the recent talk about disunion had been uttered by Democrats, whose incendiary language was briskly denounced as “an avowal of contemplated treason.” The Buchanan administration and the Lecompton constitution were condemned, and “the new dogma” that the Constitution automatically carried slavery into the territories was held unsound, “revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.” The normal condition of people in the territories was held to be one of freedom, the authority of Congress to make slavery legal in a territory was denied, and the admission of Kansas as a free state was demanded.
Then, after assailing extravagance in government, the platform advocated a protective tariff, called for a homestead act, denounced the Know-Nothing demand for restriction on the citizenship rights of naturalized immigrants, called for Federal aid for internal improvements, and commended the projected railroad to the Pacific Coast. It concluded by inviting the co-operation of all citizens who agreed with the importance of these “distinctive principles and views.”
There was something here for everyone except Southerners—for anti-slavery people, for the foreign-born, for the Eastern manufacturers, for the developing Northwest—and the platform was adopted with a great burst of cheers. Delegates and spectators sprang to their feet, waved their hats, and yelled, the ladies in the gallery fluttered their handkerchiefs and clapped their hands, and Halstead reported that “such a spectacle as was presented for some minutes has never before been witnessed at a convention.” He felt, too, that all of this jubilation carried a powerful element of enthusiasm for Seward, and as the crowds poured out into the streets, he wrote that “there is something almost irresistible here in the prestige of his fame.”12
