Lincoln was also more likable than the vain, hyper-ambitious Chase and the arrogant, dictatorial Seward. Chase had antagonized many potential supporters. The militantly antislavery Congressman Joseph Root of Ohio said “Chase is too supremely selfish to be popular or to have any devoted personal friends among men of sense who know him thoroughly but this is not his worst misfortune. I will not say that he cannot distinguish between a sycophant and a friend but I will say that he ever preferred the former until every one of his [native?] political helpers that I know belongs to the class of cheats or nincompoops.”245 Justice John McLean of the Supreme Court deemed Chase “the most unprincipled man politically that I have ever known. He is selfish, beyond any other man.”246 Both Cameron and Chase were damaged by a lack of unanimity in their home state delegations. In addition, the overconfident Ohioan had ineptly organized his presidential bid, appointing no one to serve as his manager at Chicago, where his free trade views did not sit well with the crucial Pennsylvania delegation.
Complicating the picture was the stalemate reached by Democrats at their strife-torn national convention in Charleston, which opened on April 23 and adjourned on May 3 without choosing a candidate. Along with most other observers, Lincoln had expected Douglas to win there. (In 1859, when asked about Douglas’s chances at Charleston, Lincoln replied: “Well, were it not for certain matters that I know transpired, which I regarded at one time among the impossibilities—I would say he stood no possible chance. I refer to the fact that in the Illinois contest with myself, he had the sympathy and support of Greeley, of Burlingame and Wilson of Massachusetts, and other leading Republicans; that at the same time he received the support of [Virginia Governor Henry A.] Wise and [Vice-President John C.] Breckinridge [of Kentucky], and other Southern men; that he took direct issue with the Administration, and secured, against all its power, 125,000 out of 130,000 Democratic votes cast in the State. A man that can bring such influences to bear with his own exertions, may play the d—l at Charleston.”)247 The Democrats were to reconvene in mid-June at Baltimore, when presumably they would finally name Douglas. In the meantime, the Republicans would be meeting in Chicago in mid-May without knowing for sure whom they would face. Since Lincoln was regarded as the strongest foe against Douglas, any uncertainty about the Little Giant’s becoming the Democratic standard-bearer improved Seward’s chances.
Meanwhile, conservative ex-Whigs, mostly pro-slavery Southerners, had met in Baltimore to form the Constitutional Union Party, which nominated a ticket of John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts and adopted a platform calling simply for support of the Union and the Constitution and for the enforcement of the laws. They hoped to preempt the Republicans and force them to endorse their nominee. This move enhanced Lincoln’s prospects, for it was feared that moderate Republicans might vote for Bell if the Chicago Convention chose a candidate viewed as an antislavery Radical, like Seward or Chase.
Illinois Republican Convention
Looking ahead hopefully, Lincoln predicted that he would receive unanimous support from the Illinois delegation to the coming national convention. He felt he could overcome both pro-Bates sentiment in the central and southern sections of the state and Seward support in the north. On May 9 and 10 at Decatur, 645 Republican delegates gathered in a hastily-erected structure to choose a gubernatorial candidate and adopt a platform. With John Moses and Nathan M. Knapp, Lincoln arrived a day before the convention and spent the night at the Junction House hotel, where Lincoln and Knapp shared a bed too short for them. After they retired for the night, they found that as soon as one tried to turn over, the other would wind up on the floor. After such an unceremonious ejection from the bed, Knapp exclaimed: “Well, Lincoln, I guess we shall have to reconstruct our platform!” Lincoln was so pleased with this witticism that he repeated it to many men the next day.248
Shortly after the convention opened, the tall, good-looking Richard J. Oglesby, a rising political star from Decatur who would eventually be elected governor of Illinois three times as well as U.S. senator, interrupted the proceedings by announcing: “I am informed that a distinguished citizen of Illinois, and one of whom Illinois ever delights to honor, is present, and I wish to move that this body invite him to a seat on the stand.” The 3,000 onlookers and delegates who were jammed into the makeshift 900-seat convention center impatiently waited for this man to be identified. Oglesby teased the audience by refusing to name the “distinguished citizen” immediately. When he finally shouted, “Abraham Lincoln,” the crowd roared its approval and tried to move Lincoln, who had been sitting in the rear of the hall, through the densely packed crowd to the stage. Because he was unable to penetrate the throng, they hoisted him up and passed him forward over the heads of the multitude. Scrambling and crawling over this uneasy surface, he finally reached the platform, where half a dozen delegates set him upright. “The cheering,” reported an observer, “was like the roar of the sea. Hats were thrown up by the Chicago delegation, as if hats were no longer useful.” Lincoln, who “rose bowing and blushing,” appeared to be “one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.” With a smile, he thanked the crowd for its expression of esteem.249
After the aspirants for governor had been placed in nomination but before the voting began (in which Yates defeated Swett and Judd), Oglesby once again interrupted, announcing that “an old Democrat of Macon county … desired to make a contribution to the Convention.” The crowd yelled, “Receive it!” Thereupon Lincoln’s second cousin John Hanks, accompanied by a friend, entered the hall bearing two fence rails along with a placard identifying them thus: “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.” (The sign painter was wrong about Hanks’s first name and about Thomas Lincoln’s status as an early settler in Illinois.) Oglesby’s carefully-staged theatrical gesture, conjuring up images of the 1840 log-cabin-and-cider campaign, electrified the crowd, which whooped and hollered for over ten minutes. In response to those thunderous cheers and calls of “Lincoln,” the candidate-to-be rose, examined the rails, then sheepishly told the crowd: “Well, gentlemen, I must confess I do not understand this: I don’t think I know any more about it than you do.” (This may have surprised some delegates, for the Illinois State Journal had the day before informed them that among “the sights which will greet your eyes will be a lot of rails, mauled … thirty years ago, by old Abe Lincoln and John Hanks.”)250 He added jocularly that the rails may have been hewn by him, “but whether they were or not, he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.”251 (Another witness recalled Lincoln’s words slightly differently: “My old friend here, John Hanks, will remember I used to shirk splitting all the hard cuts. But if those two are honey locust rails, I have no doubt I cut and split them.”)252 Once again the crowd cheered Lincoln, whose sobriquet “the Rail-splitter” was born that day. Ardent Seward supporters realized immediately that their champion would not win the Illinois delegation.
(According to Noah Brooks, Lincoln “was not greatly pleased with the rail incident,” for he disapproved of “stage tricks.”253 But he was, Brooks reported in 1863, rather proud of his rail-splitting talent. While visiting Union troops at the front, Lincoln noticed trees that they had chopped down. Scrutinizing the stumps, he said: “That’s a good job of felling; they have got some good axemen in this army, I see.” When Brooks asked about his expertise in rail-splitting, the president replied: “I am not a bit anxious about my reputation in that line of business; but if there is any thing in this world that I am a judge of, it is of good felling of timber.” He “explained minutely how a good job differed from a poor one, giving illustrations from the ugly stumps on either side.”)254
Oglesby had been seeking ways to emphasize Lincoln’s humble origins to justify something like Henry Clay’s cognomen, “the mill boy of the slashes.” A few days before the conven
tion he had asked Hanks what Lincoln had done well as a young settler in Illinois. “Well, not much of any kind but dreaming,” replied Hanks, “but he did help me split a lot of rails when we made a clearing twelve miles west of here.” Intrigued, Oglesby urged Hanks to show him the spot. They rode out, identified some rails that Lincoln and Hanks may have split three decades earlier, and carried away two of them. When Oglesby proposed to some friends that the rails be introduced at the Decatur Convention, they told him to go ahead, for it could do no harm and might do some good. Oglesby was not the only Illinois Republican to think the rail-splitter image would help Lincoln. In March, Nathan M. Knapp had told a friend, “I want Abe to run; then I want a picture of him splitting rails on the Sangamon Bottom, with 50 cts per hundred marked on a chip placed in the fork of a tree nearby. I think it will win.”255
The next day, when John M. Palmer introduced a resolution “that Abraham Lincoln is the first choice of Illinois for the Presidency, and that our delegates be instructed to use all honorable means for his nomination by the Chicago convention, and to cast their votes as a unit for him,” Thomas J. Turner, the leading champion of Seward’s candidacy, rose to object. Somewhat bitterly, Palmer asked if Turner were “so blind and deaf … that he cannot see and hear that this Convention is literally sitting on a volcano of its own enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln, and just aching to give three cheers and a tiger for Old Abe?”256 In response, the convention enthusiastically passed the resolution. Obviously moved by this tribute, Lincoln briefly expressed his heartfelt thanks.
The committee charged with selecting four at-large delegates sought Lincoln’s advice. The previous day, he had indicated that he wanted David Davis and Norman B. Judd chosen. In keeping with Lincoln’s wishes, both Davis, who was to act as Lincoln’s manager at Chicago, and Judd were named at-large delegates. They did not particularly like each other but cooperated to promote Lincoln’s candidacy. The two other at-large delegates, also selected by Lincoln, were Gustave Koerner, an obvious choice to please the crucial German vote, and Orville H. Browning, a Bates supporter with close ties to the Old Whigs. Lincoln ignored Davis’s plea to have John Wentworth named a delegate. Some of Lincoln’s friends, including Oglesby and Nathaniel G. Wilcox, objected that to appoint Browning would be “putting the child into the nurse[’]s arms to be strangled.” Lincoln replied, “I guess you had better let Browning go.” He explained: “I know that old Browning is not for me … but it won’t do to leave him out of the convention,” for he “will do more harm on the outside than he could on the inside.” Lincoln was “satisfied that Bates has no show. When Orville sees this he’ll undoubtedly come over to me, and do us some good with the Bates men.”257 In the end, Browning did exactly that.
Of the eighteen delegates chosen by congressional district, a few were pro-Seward, but operating under the unit rule, all would vote for Lincoln. “Our delegation will stick to Lincoln as long as there is a chance to prevent Seward getting any votes from us at all,” Herman Kreismann predicted.258 Francis Lou and James M. Ruggles, delegates who were staying at the same Decatur hotel as Lincoln, invited him to accompany them to Chicago for the national convention. “I should like to go,” Lincoln replied, “but possibly I am too much of a candidate to be there—and probably not enough to keep me away—on the whole I think I had best not go.” Enthusiastically they declared, “as to that, Mr. Lincoln, we are going to nominate you,” and boarded a train for the Windy City.259
Although the Illinoisans were prepared to work hard for Lincoln’s nomination, they did not really expect him to win. It was widely assumed that they would cast a complimentary vote for him and then turn to some other candidate. Above all they wanted to stop Seward, whose nomination would make it impossible to win the legislature, which was to choose a U.S. senator in 1861. They dreaded the prospect of a Democrat replacing Trumbull. For all his recent successes and optimistic calculations, Lincoln shared the delegation’s doubts about his chances at Chicago. He guessed that he might receive around 100 votes. “I have a notion that will be the high mark for me,” he predicted.260 In March, Henry C. Whitney told Lincoln that he could win the presidential nomination; in reply, Lincoln modestly brushed aside his friend’s speculation, saying: “It is enough honor for me to be talked about, for it.”261 Around that time he speculated to a student in his law office, “I haven’t a chance in a hundred.”262 To William Bross, who suggested he should be preparing his acceptance speech, Lincoln cautiously replied: “Well, it does look a little that way; but we can never be sure about such things.”263
15
“The Most Available Presidential Candidate
for Unadulterated Republicans”
The Chicago Convention
(May 1860)
In May 1859, Lincoln’s friend Nathan M. Knapp prophetically called him “the most available” (i.e., the most electable) presidential candidate “for unadulterated Republicans.”1 The following January, when a former congressman from Indiana was told that Republicans should nominate William L. Dayton of New Jersey for president and Lincoln as his running mate, he replied: “I would like Lincoln & Dayton better than Dayton & Lincoln,” for he favored “the most available” among the “decided straight out anti slavery men.”2
By the time the Republican national convention met in the spring of 1860, that view had become so prevalent that the “Rail-splitter” was able to capture the Republican nomination, for of all the outspoken critics of slavery, he seemed to have the best chance of winning. But his success was not inevitable; he faced strong rivals, most notably William Henry Seward of New York, the odds-on favorite as the delegates gathered in Chicago.
Undermining Seward
Delegates began arriving in Chicago well before May 16, the official opening day of the Republican convention, and they were something to behold. The journalist Simon P. Hanscom remarked that of all the sights in the world, “the small politician at a National Convention is the most entertaining. Attired in solemn black, he stalks gloomily along, as if the fate of the nation rested on his shoulders. He affects the diplomatic, and pretends to be acquainted with the sundry terrible schemes which are hatching.” Chicago itself “is a wonder to a stranger,” with “its broad avenues, magnificent buildings, splendid shops, and fine private residences.” There one could observe “all the good and the bad in our national character,” all “our headlong haste to be rich—all our contempt of old forms and ceremonies—all our ridiculous parvenu affectation—all our real energy, enterprise and perseverance, opposed to which no difficulties are insurmountable.”3
On May 12 Lincoln’s operatives gathered in the Windy City where they had failed to secure hotel rooms ahead of time, so little did they think of their man’s chances. After persuading some families to surrender their rooms in the Tremont House, they established headquarters there. Judge David Davis took command, ably assisted by attorneys from the Eighth Circuit, including Leonard Swett, Stephen T. Logan, Ward Hill Lamon, Samuel C. Parks, Clifton H. Moore, Lawrence Weldon, and Oliver Davis; by Lincoln’s friends like Jesse W. Fell, Ozias M. Hatch, Ebenezer Peck, Richard J. Oglesby, Jackson Grimshaw, Nathan M. Knapp, Jesse K. Dubois, William Butler, John M. Palmer, Theodore Canisius, and Mark W. Delahay; and by Illinois delegates, notably Norman B. Judd, Gustave Koerner, Burton C. Cook, Richard Yates, and Orville H. Browning.
“If you will put yourself at my disposal day and night,” Davis told them, “I believe Lincoln can be nominated.”4 The judge dispatched these troops in squads of two or three to lobby delegations. “No one ever thought of questioning Davis’ right to send men hither and thither, nor to question his judgment,” recalled Swett, who described the judge as “the most thorough manager of men I ever knew,” a “born ruler,” a “teacher of teachers, a man among men, a master of masters,” one who “never faltered, never gave up, never made any mistakes.”5
Their strategy was simple: first, stop Seward; next, line up about 100 delegates for Lincoln on the first ballot (233 were necessa
ry to win); then make sure that he had more votes on the second ballot in order to gain momentum; finally, clinch the nomination on the third ballot. It was important not to get Lincoln out front too early, lest other candidates combine to stop him.
To effect this plan, Davis assigned handlers to work tactfully with the delegates, greeting them upon their arrival in Chicago, escorting them to their lodgings, and making sure that all their needs were met. These handlers engaged in no hard salesmanship but rather urged their charges to consider making Lincoln their second choice, if not their first. Many delegates not already pledged to Seward were cared for in this way. On May 14, Lincoln’s operatives informed him that they were “dealing tenderly with delegates, taking them in detail, and making no fuss,” and were “not pressing too hard your claims” and thus winning “friends every where.”6 To delegates favoring Seward, they quietly argued that the New Yorker, unlike Lincoln, could not carry the swing states—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. (Some also included Connecticut and Rhode Island in that category.) Among the targets of this strategy were Bates supporters, led by Horace Greeley, who was serving as a delegate from Oregon as well as a Bates manager. The Lincoln men persuaded Bates’s delegates to support the Rail-splitter as second choice, arguing that most westerners thought the party would surely lose the national election with Chase or Seward as its standard-bearer.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 107
