by Joshua Zeitz
Pittsfield offered George his first real home. Though not formally religious, he enjoyed attending Pastor Carter’s services on Sundays, where his self-taught music skills were sufficient to secure a position as church organist, at a nominal salary of $5 per year. But it was not money that motivated him to take the job. On his first day in town, as he walked down the street in his “funny snuff-colored suit,” Nicolay’s eye wandered in the direction of Therena Bates, the slim, dark-haired daughter of the village blacksmith. She smiled at him, and he was instantly smitten. His daughter later assumed that “the mere money value” of his church position paled in comparison to the “opportunity of looking down from the organ loft, on Sunday mornings, on an olive cheek and a knot of blue-black hair.”
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Nicolay’s editorial control of the Pike County Free Press coincided with the Kansas-Nebraska controversy and the birth of the Republican Party. Unlike his friend John Hay, George was passionate about the politics of slavery, in part because his work required that he live, eat, and breathe current affairs, but also out of sincere hatred for the peculiar institution. As sole author of the paper’s editorials, he issued sharp takedowns of the “slaveocracy” and beseeched his readers to “VOTE AGAINST THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY” and “redeem Illinois from the thralldom of dough-faced demagogues.” Though sometimes blunt to the point of being incendiary, Nicolay staked out a fairly centrist and conventional viewpoint. Like most anti-Nebraska men, but unlike most abolitionists, he believed that “the Compromise of 1850 had stilled the angry waters of the great political sea . . . allayed the turbulent sectional strife, which had excited the fears and apprehensions of our greatest statesmen . . . restored harmony and union [and] established terms of peace and amity between the North and South.” It was the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska bill that had “renewed the agitation,” Nicolay maintained, by negating the principles of both the Missouri Compromise and the more recent Compromise of 1850. “Let it then be remembered, that the slavery question had remained settled, quieted and adjusted until STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS introduced it into Congress [and] repealed this time-honored law of thirty-years standing.”
Nicolay frequently described slavery as a “great evil” and echoed conventional antislavery wisdom in characterizing African Americans as human beings, not chattel. At the same time, like many antislavery advocates, he was deeply prejudiced toward African Americans and seemed unable to entertain the possibility that they might be his social or intellectual equals. In his personal correspondence, and occasionally in his published work, he referred casually to slaves and free black persons as “niggers” and believed that “free negroes are often annoying and sometimes a nuisance.” Nevertheless, he opposed an Illinois state law that barred free African Americans from moving in state and offered that they were “often a useful part of the community.” While conceding the need for laws to govern their scope of movement, he asserted that if people were “free and have committed no crime, but that of being born with a dark skin, we think they ought to be allowed a little of God’s earth to stand on.”
Under Nicolay’s editorial direction, the Free Press ran stirring reports of a fugitive slave case in Milwaukee, where the local U.S. marshal had joined forces with a plantation owner from Mississippi to arrest Joshua Glover, a local free man of color whom the slave owner claimed was a runaway. “Without showing legal authority,” the Free Press informed readers, “they broke open his house, entered, and presented a pistol to his head. Upon attempting to thrust it aside, he was knocked down and badly injured, then gagged, and without coat or hat thrown into a wagon, brought 25 miles in the middle of the night, and lodged in a Milwaukee jail.” The Free Press reported with approval that a local vigilance committee had broken Glover out of prison, spirited him north, and placed “the Slave catcher”—that is, the U.S. marshal—under arrest.
Though he demonstrated liberal regard for the humanity and basic rights of black Americans, both free and slave, Nicolay was essentially a moderate, more focused on the social, economic, and political differences between free-labor and slave societies than on the injustice of holding human beings in bondage. During a trip to Washington, D.C., in 1852, two years before the Kansas-Nebraska Act rekindled the sectional conflict, he reported on the stark physical differences that he experienced upon crossing from southern Illinois into the upper South. The slave states offered no sign of “life or progress—age and decay is strongly marked upon everything. On the contrary, the free states exhibit every evidence of prosperity, improvement and go-ahead-ativeness . . . showing that they contain by far the greater portion of talent and industry, and that they must . . . attain preeminence in point of greatness and power.” Slavery’s principal evil, in Nicolay’s mind, was its corrosive effect on labor, industry, and ambition—the engines that drove progress and civilization. Racially tolerant by contemporary standards, he shared the widespread and conventional belief that the United States was a white man’s country. The “Far West” was America’s safety valve, where “the rich inheritance of Freedom” was reserved for those who “live by their honest toil, free from the degrading competition of slave labor.”
Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act threw Northern politics into a state of extreme confusion and resulted in a widespread rout of pro-slavery Democrats in the 1854 elections. In Illinois, anti-Nebraska forces gained slim control of the state legislature. Because state legislators were responsible for choosing U.S. senators, antislavery activists could reasonably expect to elect one of their own to replace the Democratic incumbent, James Shields, whose term was set to expire the following year. But in Illinois, as throughout the North, there was as yet no Republican Party. State by state, anti-Nebraska coalitions brought erstwhile Whigs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers into an unsteady alliance. Many of these new political allies scarcely trusted one another and often did not think of themselves as long-term partners. Adding to the confusion, the new, anti-immigrant American Party—popularly called the Know-Nothings—also won scores of state legislative and congressional seats in the fall elections. Most Know-Nothings opposed the extension of slavery and therefore fell under the banner of the anti-Nebraska fusion coalition. In the wake of this incomplete electoral realignment, it was unclear who belonged to which party. When a close friend inquired as to his political allegiance, Abraham Lincoln replied, “This is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. When I was in Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of any one attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.”
Lincoln quickly emerged as the favored candidate of the anti-Nebraska coalition forces for Shields’s seat in the U.S. Senate. But there was a snag. On the first ballot, he won 45 votes to Shields’s 41—just shy of the requisite number of votes needed to secure election. Five votes went to Lyman Trumbull, an anti-Nebraska Democrat who had served alongside Lincoln in the state legislature fifteen years earlier and whose wife, the former Julia Jayne, was a close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln’s. Lincoln understood that these five holdouts were “men who never could vote for a whig; and without the votes of two of whom I never could reach the requisite number to make an election.” Over the course of several roll calls, Lincoln bled support to Trumbull, while the Democrats swapped Shields out for the popular incumbent governor, Joel Matteson. Fearing that some of the anti-Nebraska Democrats might reunite with their party and send Matteson to the Senate, Lincoln instructed his Whig supporters to fall in line with Trumbull. It was a bitter pill to swallow, and it left Lincoln feeling “disappointed and mortified.” Mary Todd Lincoln angrily cut off all relations with Julia Trumbull. For her husband, the sting was profound. “A less good humored man than I, perhaps, would not have consented to it,” he remarked.
Though many of Lincoln’s close supporters were deeply embittered by the triumph of five anti-Nebraska Democrats over forty-five anti-Nebraska Whigs
, George Nicolay was pleased. “We have the pleasure of informing our readers, this week, of the utter and final overthrow of Nebraskaism in Illinois,” he crowed. “Mr. Trumbull is an uncompromising anti-Nebraska Democrat . . . We would have been much more gratified by the election of a good Whig to that office; but as that was impossible, we heartily rejoice at the result as it was.” Nicolay made no mention of the defeated Whig candidate, Abraham Lincoln.
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Over the course of Nicolay’s two-year tenure as editor and publisher of the Free Press, practical application of the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned the Great Plains into a tinderbox, as thousands of homesteaders poured into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Most went in search of cheap land and opportunity, but the inevitable clash between slavery and free labor quickly turned violent. Neither side was willing to shirk away from the bitter “competition for the virgin soil of Kansas,” as William Seward framed the problem. Subsidized by a group of Massachusetts businessmen, the New England Emigrant Aid Company offered material assistance to Northern homesteaders, while Missouri “border ruffians,” led by that state’s Democratic senator, David Atchison, determined that “the game must be played boldly.” “If we win,” Atchison promised, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean. If we fail we lose Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and all the territories.”
By 1856, Kansas had spiraled into a well of violence and chaos. The Missouri border ruffians rode roughshod through the territory, employing violence and fraud to rig a series of legislative elections. Egged on by Atchison, who warned that Northerners planned to “take up those fertile prairies, run off your negroes, and depreciate the value of your slaves here,” the pro-slavery forces undertook a campaign of extreme terror and intimidation. “You know how to protect your own interests,” Atchison declared. “Your rifles will free you from such neighbors . . . You will go there, if necessary, with the bayonet and with blood.” When they were not stuffing ballot boxes, the Missourians were assaulting Free-Soil men. As a result, Free-Soilers, who probably made up a healthy majority of the population, armed themselves to the teeth and refused to acknowledge the authority of the official territorial government in Lecompton. Instead, they established their own shadow government in the town of Lawrence. Fighting between Free-Soilers and pro-slavery settlers grew so violent that the territory became widely known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
Tensions had already started to boil over when pro-slavery forces pillaged the free-state capital city of Lawrence, destroying the local Free-Soil newspaper office and laying ruin to the Free State Hotel, which housed the shadow territorial government. Days later, on May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner rose on the Senate floor to denounce the “crime against Kansas.” Ironically, neither Sumner nor his colleagues knew about the “sack of Lawrence,” as news of the event had not yet reached Washington, D.C. The subject of his speech was the more general disruption of law and order. A tall, good-looking man, Sumner was as imperious as he was radical, and in his three-day speech, which he privately described as “the most thorough philippic” ever delivered in the Senate chamber, he managed to offend not only those Southern colleagues who perpetrated the “crime” but also many of his Northern colleagues who offered “apologies for the crime.” The dramatic moment came when Sumner launched a sharp attack against Andrew Butler, a South Carolina senator and staunch defender of slavery. Employing highly sexual imagery—the “rape of a virgin territory,” the “depraved longing for a new slave State,” the “wench” that was slavery—Sumner denounced Butler for choosing “a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.” Sumner’s attack touched a raw nerve among slaveholders who chafed at the suggestion (often true) that they engaged in consensual and nonconsensual sex with their female slaves. The day after his speech, as Sumner attended to routine paperwork on the Senate floor, Butler’s cousin Congressman Preston Brooks entered the chamber and set upon him with a metal-tipped cane. The senators’ desks were bolted to the floor, making it impossible for Sumner to escape from his seat. Writhing in pain, he wrenched the desk up with his knees and collapsed on the bloodstained carpet. His injuries nearly killed him, and it would be four years before he could return to normal duties in the Capitol.
The incident soon came to be known as “Bleeding Sumner,” and it created a political firestorm throughout the North. The symbolic importance of the crime was arresting. Southerners no longer seemed content to employ violence and terrorism in Kansas. Now they had brought their war of aggression into the halls of Congress. “No meaner exhibition of Southern cowardice—generally miscalled Southern chivalry—was ever witnessed,” the New-York Tribune intoned. “The South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color . . . that Democracy is an illusion and a lie.” Writing for the Free Press, Nicolay joined the chorus of outrage, denouncing the attack as a “cowardly and atrocious” act. “Things have truly come to a pretty pass when a Senator of the United States is to be cruelly beaten by a cowardly ruffian for exercising his right of free speech in the council hall of his country.” The slaveholders were now “determined to carry their points by foul means if not by fair. Unable to cope with such men as Sumner in open debate, they resort to weapons of the ruffian, and the robber’s mode of assault.”
Like that of other Free-Soil activists, Nicolay’s opposition to slavery evolved as 1856 wore on. Slavery, it now seemed, was more than a bad social or economic system. It represented the absolute antithesis of democracy. Unless they met the challenge head-on, free white people stood to be enslaved themselves—and not just rhetorically. “In the coming campaign,” he wrote that summer, “we shall fight for Freedom, and against Slavery. We shall fight for free suffrage, for the right of the people to bear arms, for their right to choose their own rulers, for liberty of speech and the freedom of the Press and for the protection of life and property. All these rights and privileges, which are the glory and pride of American citizens, have been violated and usurped by . . . an unscrupulous slave power.”
The events of May 1856 electrified the Northern electorate and fused the anti-Nebraska coalition into a permanent political organization. That summer, delegates from every free state in the Union converged on Philadelphia to select the Republican Party’s first presidential and vice presidential candidates. The convention adopted a strong antislavery platform (David Wilmot, whose proviso foreshadowed the crisis of the 1850s, chaired the platform committee). Calling for a ban on slavery in the western territories, the Republicans forged a middle ground between radical antislavery activists and conservative supporters of law and order and union. On the second day of the proceedings, the convention tapped John C. Frémont, the famous army explorer whose movements in California during the Bear Flag Revolt had earned him national acclaim. A son-in-law of the mercurial Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, Frémont had served a brief term in the Senate, where he joined other Northern Democrats in opposing the westward spread of slavery. For the vice presidential spot, Abraham Lincoln enjoyed early support. But delegates ultimately selected William Dayton, a former Whig senator from New Jersey.
Hoisting banners that read “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont,” the delegates closed the convention’s business and marched onward to the fall canvass. Frémont lost the election—in which a stunning 83 percent of eligible voters participated—to the Democrat James Buchanan, but the new party performed exceptionally well and won strong representation in both houses of Congress.
In Illinois, Lincoln emerged as the de facto leader of the new Republican organization. At some point that year, he and Trumbull staged a joint campaign appearance in Pittsfield, where a local Republican activist introduced him to Nicolay. By that time, the young editor had become a regular speaker on the Pike County campaign circuit and a prominent enough leader in the local antislavery movement to earn election as a
delegate to the first statewide Republican convention, held in Bloomington. There, according to William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner at the time, the future president delivered a speech “full of fire and energy and force . . . It was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath.”
From his seat in the rafters, Nicolay watched as Lincoln “held the audience in such rapt attention that the news reporters dropped their pencils and forgot their work.” Known thereafter as Lincoln’s “lost speech,” as no record of it exists, it was looked back on by many as the best of his career. Decades later, reflecting on his “good fortune” to have been in the hall that day, Nicolay marveled at the string of
momentous and related events it was my privilege to witness in the stirring years that succeeded. In the Representatives Hall at Springfield, I heard him deliver the famous address in which he quoted the Scriptural maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand . . . In the Wigwam at Chicago I heard the roll-call and the thunderous applause that decided and greeted his first nomination for President. On the East Portico of the Capitol in Washington I heard him read his First Inaugural in which he announced the Union to be perpetual. On the battlefield at Gettysburg I heard him pronounce the immortal Gettysburg Address. I saw him sign the Joint Resolution of Congress which authorized the XIII Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And once more, on the East Portico, I heard from his lips the sublime words of the Second Inaugural.
