Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Reports of Democratic fraud abounded. A St. Louis newspaper claimed that hundreds of men were “being hired, publicly in our streets to go to Illinois, ostensibly to work on the Railroads, but really to vote for the Democratic candidates for the Legislature.”306 A resident of Princeton complained that “Irishmen are sent into the doubtful districts along the lines of railroads by the hundreds, with the intention, no doubt, of getting their votes into the ballot boxes if possible.” He also warned that even if Republican candidates prevailed, Democratic clerks might certify their opponents as the victors, as they had done in two districts in 1856.307 Chester P. Dewey reported in mid-October that a “gentle colonization of voters is going on, almost imperceptibly.” A newcomer “is seen for a moment at a depot, and then merged in the general population of the region. Here and there a few Irishmen leave the [rail] cars, and either go to work upon railroads or seek employment in cutting corn among the farmers.”308 Governor Matteson, whose corruption would be exposed the following year, allegedly said that he had so arranged things that the Democrats would carry McLean, Sangamon, Madison, and Morgan counties, the swing districts where the outcome of the election would be determined. On election eve, David Davis told a friend: “Lincoln has made a magnificent canvass. There would be no doubt of Douglas defeat if it was not from the fact that he is colonizing Irish voters.”309 Herndon predicted that “there is nothing which can well defeat us but the elements, & the wandering roving robbing Irish, who have flooded over the State.”310

  When the votes were tallied, Lincoln’s prediction to David R. Locke was borne out: the Republicans won the two statewide offices (by an average margin of 124,993 to 122,011—50.6% to 49.4%) but failed to gain control of the legislature. The election results are somewhat difficult to interpret with precision, but generally speaking Republican candidates for the Illinois House of Representatives won a total of 190,468, their Democratic opponents 166,374, and the Danites 9,951. If in fact all votes for Democratic legislative candidates were cast to indicate a preference for Douglas over Lincoln, and all Republican votes were deliberately cast to indicate a preference for Lincoln over Douglas, then the challenger beat the incumbent handily, winning 52 percent to the Little Giant’s 45 percent. Similarly, in the twelve races for senate seats, Republican candidates won 54 percent of the votes cast. Obviously, many who voted in the legislative election failed to vote for the state treasurer or state superintendent of education. If, in 1858, U.S. senators had been popularly elected, Lincoln would have trounced Douglas.

  But even under the prevailing system for choosing senators, Lincoln would have won if the legislature had been fairly apportioned. In the eight years following the 1850 census, upon which the legislative districts were created, the state’s population had swollen, especially in the north. The Republican Party won 50 percent of the votes for statewide office but only 46 percent of legislative races, whereas Douglas’s faction won 48 percent of the statewide vote and 54 percent of the legislature. According to the 1855 census, the forty House districts carried by the Democrats had a population of 606,278, and the thirty-three Republican districts had 699,840 inhabitants. In Madison County, where 4,300 votes were cast, the Democrats won by a margin of 200 and sent two Representatives to the General Assembly; in McLean County, where 4,900 votes were cast, the Republicans won by a majority of 600 and sent one member to the Illinois House. Adams County, where 6,000 votes were cast, went Democratic by a margin of 200 and sent two Representatives to the House; in the Republican counties of La Salle, Livingston, and Grundy, 11,000 votes were cast, yet only two members were sent to the House. Fulton County, with 5,500 votes, also had two legislators, while Cook, with nearly four times the voting population (19,000), had only four Representatives. Will County with 10,000 voters had just three Representatives. A switch of 400 votes in Sangamon and Madison counties would have given the Republicans a majority of the House and the ability to elect Lincoln. According to calculations made by the Illinois State Journal, if the legislature had been apportioned on a one-man one-vote basis, the Republicans would have elected forty-one Representatives and fourteen Senators, giving Lincoln the U.S. senate seat. The Little Giant clearly owed his victory to a malapportioned legislature.

  Although the Illinois State Register was pleased that Douglas would be returned to the senate, it regretted that Republican candidates for the legislature had in the aggregate outpolled their Democratic rivals. The editors asserted that the “treachery of Danite officials” gave “niggerism this preponderance.”311 In races for the General Assembly, which Democrats already controlled going into the election, they did especially well in the counties that two years earlier had gone for Fillmore (or a combination of Fillmore and Frémont voters). They gained one senate seat (in the Madison-Bond-Montgomery district) and six House seats: two in Madison County, two in Sangamon County, one in Wabash and White counties combined, and one in Mason and Logan counties combined. In Morgan County, Lincoln had hoped that Richard Yates would run for the legislature, just as he had done to help Yates four years earlier; Yates, however, did not reciprocate.

  The Republican margin of victory in the popular vote was considerably greater than Governor Bissell had enjoyed in 1856. It might have been even larger if Republicans in northern Illinois had turned out in greater numbers. There 5,000 to 10,000 party faithful did not bother to vote because of bad weather (election day was cold and raw) and because they rightly assumed that their legislative candidates would win easily. In addition, some labored under the false impression that Douglas had forever broken with the Democratic Party; others were influenced by the Eastern Republicans’ support of the Little Giant.

  With justice, Republicans also blamed apostate Old Line Whigs for the failure to capture the legislature. As they had done in the Frémont campaign, those Whigs balked, especially in Sangamon, Madison, Jersey, and Tazewell counties. David Davis, who was grieved “beyond measure,” complained bitterly to Lincoln that the “Pharisaical old Whigs in the Central counties, who are so much more righteous than other people, I can[’]t talk about with any patience—The lever of Judge Dickey[’]s influence has been felt—He drew the letter out of Mr Crittenden, & I think, in view of every thing, that it was perfectly outrageous in Mr Crittenden to have written any thing—.… It was very shameful in my opinion for Dickey, to have kept that letter from 1st Augt & then published it a week before the election.”312 (Lincoln also felt that Dickey’s efforts had helped defeat him, but he bore no grudge.)

  Illinois Republicans seethed with anger over the conduct of the Eastern leaders of their party, especially Seward and Greeley. The Chicago Press and Tribune ascribed Lincoln’s defeat primarily to the intervention of Crittenden and the coolness of the East Coast Republicans, of whom it exclaimed: “every effort of our friends abroad was for our enemies at home!”313 Indeed, the pro-Seward New York Times lauded Douglas on the eve of the election, and the New York Tribune acknowledged that its relative silence during the campaign “was damaging in a State where more people read this paper than any other.”314 Ebenezer Peck bitterly complained to Trumbull: “Now that Seward Greel[e]y & Co have contributed so much to our defeat, they may expect us, in the true christian spirit to return good for evil—but in this I fear they will find themselves mistaken. If the vote of Illinois can nominate another than Seward—I hope it will be so cast. The coals of fire, I would administer, will be designed to raise a severe blister.”315 John M. Palmer, agreeing that Lincoln was “betrayed by the eastern Republicans,” suggested that in the future the antislavery forces in Illinois should just advocate “free homes for free white people.”316 The heartsick George W. Rives exclaimed: “I say D[am]n Greeley & Co.—they have done more harm to us in Ills. than all others beside not excepting the D[am]n Irish.” Lincoln “is too good a man to be thus treated by these D[amned] Sons [of] bitches.” John Tilson of Quincy echoed Rives and claimed that he could identify twenty “ardent Republicans” who “swear they never will vote for Wm. H. Seward.”
Among those twenty, Tilson probably counted his neighbor Jackson Grimshaw, who feared that “Seward will be forced on us for President. I can[’]t work for him or any man that actively or quietly endorsed or aided Douglas.”317 To a friend in Massachusetts, Herndon complained that “Greeley has done us infinite harm.” Republicans in the Prairie State “were like innocent fools waiting out here to hear Greeley open in his great Tribune: we expected that he would open the ball, but no signal boom came, and we grew restively cold, and our party slumbered as with a chill—a bivouac of death upon an iceberg.”318 David Davis told another Bay State resident that “Greeley & Truman Smith &c have thrown cold water on the election of Lincoln. Their conduct is shameful.… To think of Greeley taking no part in the contest.”319 Davis told Lincoln, “Some of you may forgive him [Crittenden], & Gov Seward & Mr Greeley, but I cannot.”320

  For their part, a few Republicans in the East were equally bitter about their party confreres in Illinois. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts maintained that “the course of the Republicans in that state was a great political crime, that if they had supported him [Douglas], he would have ensured us the North as a unity & at the same time not been the leader—but now he can dictate terms.”321

  William Herndon offered a plausibly complex analysis of Lincoln’s defeat: “We never got a smile or a word of encouragement outside of Ill[inoi]s from any quarter—during all this great canvass. The East was for Douglas by silence. This silence was terrible to us.… Crittenden wrote letters to Ill[inoi]s urging the Americans and old line whigs to go for Douglas, and so they went ‘helter-skelter.’ Thousands of whigs dropt us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden.… All the pro-slavery men, North as well as South, went to a man for Douglas. They threw into this State money, and men, and speakers. These forces & powers we were wholly denied by our Northern & Eastern friends. This cowed us somewhat.” Herndon was especially indignant at the “hell-doomed Irish.” He complained that “thousands of wild roving robbing bloated pock-marked Irish” were “imported upon us from Phila[delphia], N[ew] Y[ork], St. Louis, and other cities.” No single cause defeated Lincoln; “it was the combination … that ‘cleaned us out.’” Herndon did emphasize, however, the critical importance of the southern-born Old Line Whigs, whom he described as “timid—shrinking, but good, men.”322

  The Chicago Democrat thought Crittenden’s intervention more damaging than the attitude of the Eastern Republicans. “The Seward papers in New York and other places may have done us a little injury upon the popular vote, but the loss of no member of the legislature can be attributed to them. It was in the Old Whig and American portions of the State; it was among the Fillmore voters that Mr. Lincoln was slaughtered. The Republican papers there that made Senator Crittenden much stronger than he ever was before, and he was always strong among the emigrants from the slave States. He did all he could against Lincoln. Thus was Lincoln slain in Old Kentucky.”323

  Lincoln shared this view. Two days after the election, he told Crittenden: “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me; but, even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything dishonorable.”324 (The following year, Lincoln publicly described Crittenden as a man “I have always loved with an affection as tender and endearing as I have ever loved any man.”)325 To Anson G. Henry he complained that “nearly all the old exclusive silk-stocking whiggery is against us. I do not mean nearly all the old whig party; but nearly all of the nice exclusive sort. And why not? There has been nothing in politics since the Revolution so congenial to their nature, as the present position of the great democratic party.”326 Lincoln remarked that attorney William W. Danenhower was one of the very few prominent members of the American Party in Illinois who supported him.

  Those “emotions of defeat” Lincoln spoke of were mixed. On January 7, he “good-naturedly” told a journalist “that he felt like the Kentucky boy, who, after having his finger squeezed pretty badly, felt ‘too big to cry, and too badly hurt to laugh.’ ”327 Years later he recalled that on the “dark, rainy, & gloomy” night when the election returns showed that the Democrats had won the legislature, he started to walk home. “The path had been worn hog-back & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’ ”328 He told friends that even though he lost, he felt “ready for another fight,” predicted that “it will all come out right in the end,” and remarked: “Douglas has taken this trick, but the game is not played out.”329 Henry Villard, who called on Lincoln shortly after the election, reported that the defeat “did not seem to grate upon his mind. He was resigned. He knew that he had made a good fight—no matter what the result. His talk was cheerful. His wit and humor had not deserted him.”330

  But they did desert him on January 5, 1859, when the legislature formally reelected Douglas by a vote of 54 to 46, despite the Danites’ attempts to prevent a quorum and thus leave the senate seat vacant. Later that day Henry C. Whitney found Lincoln alone in his office “gloomy as midnight … brooding over his ill-fortune.” Whitney “never saw any man so radically and thoroughly depressed.” Lincoln, “completely steeped in the bitter waters of hopeless despair,” said “several times, with bitterness, ‘I expect everybody to desert me.’ ”331

  Lincoln did not commit such sentiments to paper; when writing to friends, he was stoic. In mid-November he told Norman B. Judd: “I am convalescent, and hoping these lines may find you in the same improving state of health. Doubtless you have suspected for some time that I entertained a personal wish for a term in the U.S. Senate; and had the suspicion taken the shape of a direct charge, I think I could not have truthfully denied it. But let the past as nothing be.”332 To his old friend Anson G. Henry he declared, “I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and 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.”333 (Henry assured him that he had not disappeared from sight and predicted that the people “will bear you on their memories untill the time comes for putting you in possession of their House at Washington.”)334 Three weeks later Lincoln wrote in a similar vein: “while I desired the result of the late canvass to have been different, I still regard it as an exceeding small matter. I think we have fairly entered upon a durable struggle as to whether this nation is to ultimately become all slave or all free, and though I fall early in the contest, it is nothing if I shall have contributed, in the least degree, to the final rightful result.”335

  Lincoln derived consolation from the history of the British movement to abolish the African slave trade. “I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station,” he wrote during the campaign, “and were I to do so now, I should only make myself ridiculous.” But, he added, “I have never failed—do not now fail—to remember that in the republican cause there is a higher aim than that of mere office. I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the Slave-trade by Great Britain, was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success; that the measure had it’s open fire-eating opponents; it’s stealthy ‘don’t care’ opponents; it’s dollar and cent opponents; it’s inferior race opponents; its negro equality opponents; and its religion and good order opponents; that all these opponents got offices, and their adversaries got none. But I have also remembered that though they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell.” But the champions of the movement to abolish the slave trade achieved enduring fame. “School-boys know that [William] Wilbe[r]force, and Granville Sharpe, helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single
man who labored to retard it? Remembering these things I can not but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But I can not doubt either that it will come in due time. Even in this view, I am proud, in my passing speck of time, to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see.”336

  Lincoln was also confident that Douglas would eventually be crushed between the upper and nether millstones, for he could not continue to please both the South and the North. To Charles H. Ray, who said he was “feeling like h-ll,” Lincoln wrote in late November: “Quit that. You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again. Douglas managed to be supported as the best instrument to put down and to uphold the slave power; but no ingenuity can long keep these antagonisms in harmony.”337 In 1860, Lincoln voiced similar amazement at another of Douglas’s feats. More than any man he had ever known, the Little Giant “has the most audacity in maintaining an untenable position. Thus, in endeavoring to reconcile popular sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision, his argument, stripped of sophistry, is: ‘It is legal to expel slavery from a territory where it legally exists.’ And yet he has bamboozled thousands into believing him.”338

  What the Democratic press called “Mr. Lincoln’s niggerism,” which Douglas emphasized heavily, played a key role in the election. The Springfield Illinois State Register, the leading Democratic paper downstate, harped on the race question throughout the campaign. A typical example of its rhetoric appeared in a description of the menu for the Republicans of Sangamon County at a local convention. The choices, said the Register, consisted of “nigger in the soups, nigger in the substantials, nigger in the desert [sic]—Lincoln and nigger equality all through.” On election eve, the Register proclaimed in extra large print: “PEOPLE OF SANGAMON REMEMBER, A VOTE FOR [Republican legislative candidates John] COOK AND [James N.] BROWN IS A VOTE FOR LINCOLN AND NEGRO EQUALITY.” The next day that same journal warned readers: “Lincoln says that a negro is your equal.”339 On election day, the Chicago Times thrice proclaimed, in large capital letters: “A VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES IS A VOTE TO CROWD WHITE LABORERS OUT OF, AND BRING NEGROES INTO THE CITY.”340 The town of Lincoln voted against its namesake because, as one resident put it, “We had too many honest incorruptable boys who did not nor would [not] believe a negro their equal.”341