Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  With determination, Lincoln insisted that the “fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.”387 The future looked bright, for “the Republican star gradually rises higher everywhere.”388 He had “abiding faith that we shall beat them in the long run.”389 Perhaps that victory might even occur in the short run because, he predicted, “it is almost certain that we shall be far better organized for 1860 than ever before.”390 And so they were.

  14

  “That Presidential Grub Gnaws Deep”

  Pursuing the Republican Nomination

  (1859–1860)

  In 1863, Lincoln reflected that “[n]o man knows, when that Presidential grub gets to gnawing at him, just how deep in it will get until he has tried it.”1 The grub began seriously gnawing at Lincoln after the 1858 campaign. His astute friend Joseph Gillespie believed that the debates with Douglas “first inspired him with the idea that he was above the average of mankind.”2 Though that was probably true, Lincoln dismissed any talk of the presidency. During the canvass with the Little Giant he told a reporter: “Mary insists … that I am going to be Senator and President of the United States, too.” Then, “shaking all over with mirth at his wife’s ambition,” he exclaimed: “Just think of such a sucker as me as President!”3 In December 1858, when his friend and ally Jesse W. Fell urged him to seek the Republican presidential nomination, he replied: “Oh, Fell, what’s the use of talking of me for the presidency, whilst we have such men as Seward, Chase and others, who are so much better known to the people, and whose names are so intimately associated with the principles of the Republican party.” When Fell persisted, arguing that Lincoln was more electable than Seward, Chase, and the others, Lincoln agreed: “I admit the force of much of what you say, and admit that I am ambitious, and would like to be President. I am not insensible to the compliment you pay me … but there is no such good luck in store of me as the presidency.”4

  The following spring, when Republican editors planned to endorse him for president, he balked. “I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he said. “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort … should be made.”5 When William W. Dannehower told Lincoln that his name was being seriously considered by Republican leaders for the presidency, he laughingly replied: “Why, Danenhower, this shows how political parties are degenerating; you and I can remember when we thought no one was fit for the Presidency but ‘Young Harry of the West,’ [i.e., Henry Clay] and now you seem to be seriously considering me for that position. It’s absurd.”6

  But it was not absurd, for the race for the nomination was wide open. Seward was the ostensible front-runner, but many thought him unelectable. Other men whose names were being tossed about—Salmon P. Chase, John McLean, Nathaniel P. Banks, Edward Bates, Lyman Trumbull, Jacob Collamer, Benjamin F. Wade, Henry Wilson—were all long shots at best. As an Indiana Republican noted in December 1858, “there is no serious talk of any one.”7

  Despite his modesty, between August 1859 and March 1860 Lincoln positioned himself for a presidential run by giving speeches and corresponding with party leaders in several states, among them Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Kansas. At the same time, he labored to keep Republicans on a prudent middle course between the Scylla of Douglas’s popular sovereignty and the Charybdis of radical abolitionism. Only thus could his party capture the White House. And only thus could a lesser-known Moderate like himself lead the ticket.

  Lincoln took encouragement from the ever-widening rift in the Democratic Party over such issues as a federal slave code for the territories and the reopening of the African slave trade. To Herndon and others he said, in substance: “an explosion must come in the near future. Douglas is a great man in his way and has quite unlimited power over the great mass of his party, especially in the North. If he goes to the Charleston Convention [of the national Democratic Party in 1860], which he will do, he, in a kind of spirit of revenge, will split the Convention wide open and give it the devil; & right here is our future success or rather the glad hope of it.” Herndon recalled that Lincoln “prayed for this state of affairs,” for “he saw in it his opportunity and wisely played his line.”8

  Law Practice

  Before turning his attention fully to politics, Lincoln had to restore his depleted bank account. Two weeks after the 1858 election, he told Norman B. Judd, “I have been on expences so long without earning any thing that I am absolutely without money now for even household purchases.”9 Worse still, he was expected to help pay off the party’s $3,000 debt. He pledged $250 which, he said, “with what I have already paid … will exceed my subscription of five hundred dollars. This too, is exclusive of my ordinary expences during the campaign, all which being added to my loss of time and business, bears pretty heavily upon one no better off in world’s goods than I; but as I had the post of honor, it is not for me to be over-nice.”10 He lamented that “this long struggle has been one of great pecuniary loss,” so much so that he feared he would “go to the wall for bread and meat, if I neglect my business this year as well as last.”11

  As Lincoln grudgingly devoted himself once again to the law, he found it difficult to readjust to the routine of legal work. “Well,” he told a friend, “I shall now have to get down to the practice. It is an easy matter to adjust a harvester to tall or short grain by raising or lowering the sickle, but it is not so easy to change our feelings and modes of expression to suit the stump or the bar.”12

  Lincoln was especially vexed to have to execute judgments by selling land. In the fall of 1858, Samuel C. Davis and Company of St. Louis, an excellent client whom Lincoln and Herndon had represented twenty-seven times in federal court, complained that the two lawyers had failed to collect money won in a judgment. Angrily Lincoln told his client that, as he had earlier explained, the money was to be raised by the sale of land owned by the defendant, that “under our law, the selling of land on execution is a delicate and dangerous, matter; that it could not be done safely, without a careful examination of titles; and also of the value of the property.” To carry out this task “would require a canvass of half the State.” When Davis and Company failed to give clear instructions about how to proceed, Lincoln and Herndon hired a young lawyer to conduct such a canvass. The results were forwarded with the request that Davis and Company state what they wanted done. The company did not answer. Lincoln heatedly declared: “My mind is made up. I will have no more to do with this class of business. I can do business in Court, but I can not, and will not follow executions all over the world.… I would not go through the same labor and vexation again for five hundred [dollars].” He told Davis and Company to turn the matter over to the attorney who had examined the titles.13

  Other clients were also growing impatient with Lincoln & Herndon. Peter and Charles Ambos of the Columbus Machine Company expressed disappointment at Lincoln’s neglect in pressing a claim. Exasperated by what he called an “annoyance” and a “disagreeable matter,” Lincoln told Ambos in June 1859, “I would now very gladly surrender the charge of the case to anyone you would designate, without charging anything for the much trouble I have already had.”14 Samuel Galloway of Ohio assured Lincoln that Ambos and his colleagues, like most clients, were simply trying to make their lawyer a scapegoat.

  In the late summer of 1859, Lincoln tried one of his few murder cases, defending Peachy Quinn Harrison, a grandson of his former political adversary, Peter Cartwright. Harrison allegedly stabbed to death a young attorney named Greek Crafton. Since both the Crafton and Harrison families were well-known in Sangamon County, the lengthy, complicated, and tedious trial became a cause celébrè. Herndon recalled that the case was “ably conducted on both sides; every inch of ground was contested, hotly fought … with feeling, fervor, and eloquence.”15

  Thro
ughout the trial Lincoln was thwarted by adverse rulings from the bench. When he objected, citing authorities that clearly sustained his argument, the judge, Edward Y. Rice, overruled him. According to Herndon, Lincoln grew “so angry that he looked like Lucifer in an uncontrollable rage.” Careful to stay “within the bounds of propriety just far enough to avoid a reprimand for contempt of court,” he was “fired with indignation and spoke fiercely [and] strongly” against the ruling of the judge, whom “he pealed … from head to foot.” He “had the crowd, the jury, the bar, in perfect sympathy and accord.”16

  The turning point of the trial came when Peter Cartwright testified that the dying Crafton told him that he forgave his killer and urged that Harrison not be held responsible. Cartwright’s hearsay testimony, which amazingly was allowed to stand, helped sway the jury. In his closing speech, Lincoln urged the jurors to heed Cartwright’s lachrymose account of Crafton’s deathbed plea, which they did, finding Harrison innocent.

  Combating Douglasism

  Surveying the political landscape in late 1858, Lincoln saw his party still tempted to unite with Douglas. He anticipated that the Little Giant might once again bolt the Democratic Party as he had done over the Lecompton Constitution; this time his rebellion might be against a federal slave code for the territories. The senator could, Lincoln thought, “claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power.” If that should happen, Lincoln predicted, “the struggle in the whole North will be, as it was in Illinois last summer and fall, whether the Republican party can maintain it’s identity, or be broken up to form the tail of Douglas’s new kite.” In December 1858, he bitterly remarked to Lyman Trumbull that “[s]ome of our great Republican doctors will then have a splendid chance to swallow the pills they so eagerly prescribed for us last Spring.” But the idea was still foolish: “The truth is, the Republican principle can, in no wise live with Douglas; and it is arrant folly now, as it was last Spring, to waste time, and scatter labor already performed, in dallying with him.”17

  In January 1859, a Pennsylvanian called Lincoln’s attention to a Republican editor who praised Douglas. In reply, Lincoln was emphatic: “All dallying with Douglas by Republicans, … is, at the very least, time, and labor lost,” and those who do would live to regret their folly. The Little Giant and President Buchanan, for all their antagonism, both supported the Dred Scott decision, both remained indifferent to the moral wrong of slavery, both viewed the slavery issue as a matter of economics, and both accepted the principle that the peculiar institution must exist in the South. To support either of those Democrats “is simply to reach the same goal by only slightly different roads.”18

  Lincoln made the same point in March 1859, reminding a Republican audience in Chicago that the fight against slavery expansion was a struggle against slavery itself, indirect though it may be: “Never forget that we have before us this whole matter of the right or wrong of slavery in this Union, though the immediate question is as to its spreading out into new Territories and States.” Let us not lower our standard, he counseled. “If we do not allow ourselves to be allured from the strict path of our duty by such a device as shifting our ground and throwing ourselves into the rear of a leader who denies our first principle, denies that there is an absolute wrong in the institution of slavery, then the future of the Republican cause is safe and victory is assured.” All that was necessary was “to keep the faith, to remain steadfast to the right, to stand by your banner. Nothing should lead you to leave your guns. Stand together, ready, with match in hand.”19

  Lincoln cautioned the platform-writing Republicans of Kansas: “the only danger will be the temptation to lower the Republican Standard in order to gather recruits,” either from Douglas’s supporters or from his Southern opponents. Such a tactic “would open a gap through which more would pass out than pass in.” The core Republican principle, he reminded them, was “preventing the spread and nationalization of Slavery. This object surrendered, the organization would go to pieces.” If a coalition with Democrats could be formed by ignoring the slavery issue, “it will result in gaining no single electorial vote in the South and losing ev[e]ry one in the North.”20

  When American Party leader Nathan Sargent, Lincoln’s former messmate at Mrs. Sprigg’s boarding house in Washington, suggested that the Republicans coalesce with the Douglas Democrats on a platform opposing the resumption of the African slave trade and calling for “eternal hostility to the rotten democracy,” Lincoln predicted that such an alliance might carry Maryland, but no other state. “Your platform proposes to allow the spread, and nationalization of slavery to proceed without let or hindrance, save only that it shall not receive supplies directly from Africa,” he told Sargent. “Surely you do not seriously believe the Republicans can come to any such terms.”21

  In a public letter to Massachusetts Republicans, who were organizing a festival to honor the memory of Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln appealed in more idealistic terms. He argued that the current Democratic Party had deserted Jefferson by holding “the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property.” Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence framed “the definitions and axioms of free society,” which were now disowned by Democrats, who refer to them as “glittering generalities,” “self-evident lies,” and principles applying “only to ‘superior races.’ ” Such expressions “are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the vanguard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.” Forcefully he maintained that whoever “would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.” Jefferson should be revered for the “coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”22

  (Lincoln was a Jeffersonian only in his devotion to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and to the antislavery sentiment embodied in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and in Jefferson’s remark about slavery, often quoted by Lincoln: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” Lincoln rejected Jefferson’s agrarianism, his devotion to states rights, and his hostility to industrialization, urbanization, banks, and protective tariffs.)23

  Impressed, the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican said that “as a literary document” Lincoln’s letter was “one of the most remarkable we ever met.”24 Another admirer was Lincoln’s shrewd friend, Nathan M. Knapp, who detected in Lincoln’s honoring of Jefferson “more of old ’76 Republicanism” than any other Republican aspirant for the presidency displayed.25

  If Republicans could keep their focus and avoid unseemly alliances, they still faced the difficulty of their own heterogeneity. As an Indiana politico put it, “Jack Falstaff never marched through Coventry with a more motl[e]y crowd than will be gathered under the Republican banner,” including “Abolitionists died in the wool, know Nothings, [and] Maine Liquor Law [temperance] men.”26 The most ominous fault line in the new party was the barely suppressed antagonism between former Whigs and former Democrats. A southern Illinois Republican wrote in March 1860, “We have not forgotten our former party prejudices. And whigs and democrats retain altogether too much hostility against each other to be good Republicans.”27 When Trumbull informed him that John Wentworth was working to create ill-will between ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats (notably, between the Illinois senator and Lincoln), Lincoln felt he had to respond sharply. “Any effort,” he told Trumbull, “to put enmity between
you and me, is as idle as the wind.” Promising to sustain Trumbull in his reelection bid in 1860, Lincoln played down concern over “the old democratic and whig elements of our party breaking into opposing factions. They certainly shall not, if I can prevent it.”28

  Yet another threat to Republican solidarity emerged in the spring of 1859 when the Massachusetts Legislature passed an amendment to the state constitution requiring immigrants to wait two years after naturalization before becoming eligible to vote or hold office. Germans throughout the country waxed indignant at the Bay State Republicans and demanded that the party repudiate the so-called two-years amendment. “You know we are powerless here without the Protestant foreign vote,” Charles Henry Ray warned Massachusetts Governor Nathaniel P. Banks; “no party which cannot command it in the next Presidential election has the ghost of a chance of success.” If the amendment were adopted, Ray said, Republicans would “go into the contest of 1860 with the certainty of defeat.”29 Lincoln bemoaned the shortsightedness of the Bay Staters: “Massachusetts republicans should have looked beyond their noses; and then they could not have failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole North-West.”30

  When Theodore Canisius, the German-American editor of the Springfield Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, asked Lincoln to give his opinion of the Massachusetts amendment, he replied: “I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any other place, where I have a right to oppose it.” Tactfully disclaiming any authority to tell Massachusetts voters how they should behave, he nevertheless condemned the animus behind the two-years amendment. Because “the spirit of our institutions” is “to aim at the elevation of men I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.”