A few months earlier, in September 1855, Lincoln had suffered a terrible humiliation when he had come to Cincinnati to serve as cocounsel in the landmark Manny-McCormick reaper patent case. He had been hired because it was thought the case might be tried in Illinois. Arguing the case would have been a large step up for him. The imperious corporate attorney in charge, Edwin McMasters Stanton, took one look at him and remarked to another lawyer on the team, “Why did you bring that damned long-armed ape here?” Barred from a chair at the table, Lincoln learned a harsh lesson. If he were to rise beyond his circuit, it would not be by the law. But others who studied him, including eventually Stanton, would learn his “antithetical character,” as Whitney described it, “the wide contrast between his exterior and formal guilelessness and simplicity of nature, and the depth of finesse, sagacity, and diplomacy which that exterior simplicity masked and concealed.”
Lincoln was always approachable, utterly without affectation or pretense. He told homespun stories to juries, coarse jokes to men in the back of country stores, and played the jester among Judge Davis’s traveling troupe of lawyers. His awkward and ungainly physical movements, tousled hair, repertoire of entertaining tales he liked to spin out in his Kentucky accent, and unwavering attention to others’ rambling talk made him appear open, direct, and sympathetic. His plainness was authentic, his concern genuine, and his humility natural, but he was conscious that his face and manner were also screens. He could be as remote and distracted as he seemed close and warm. While he had no interest in finer things for himself or an elegant cut of his clothes, though he was happy to buy gifts for Mary and willing to wear better suits to satisfy her, he was acutely aware of the effects of his seeming lack of sophistication on others even as he seemed to be outwardly indifferent to it. He came to rely on misjudgment of his complexity by virtue of easy assumptions drawn from his appearance. Since as a young stranger he had first turned up in overalls at the after-hours debating society of his elders in New Salem and stunned the crowd with his ability to speak and reason, he had drawn together his contradictory pieces into a coherent whole. His experience in New Salem was the first time Lincoln recognized the effect his appearance had on an audience, shocking them out of their low expectations by his performance, a phenomenon that was replicated at every stage of his life from Springfield to Washington and in every new place he entered from Cooper Union to the White House. He both suffered and profited from misplaced perceptions that by his looks he was artless, innocent, or ordinary. Even his regularity as a party politician masked his unconventionality. The basic elements that he worked with were his own mind and matter. He would command an army and navy, but he began as an apprentice of self-command. It had taken Lincoln decades to achieve a self-mastery that he gradually extended over a country and its circumstances.
“His awkwardness of manner, heartiness of welcome, promises, and direct statements were genuine; his dissimulation was never express or affirmative, but always negative, implied, and utilitarian,” observed Whitney. “. . . He would frequently launch out or lapse into inappropriate and fatuous themes in order to evade or neutralize those which were mal apropos or mischievous. . . . These by-plays of diplomacy served a needed purpose, and met a current emergency, but did not add to the fame or dignity of its possessor. Superficial men who met him on these terms, judged him by the ostensible act, and not by its occult force or ultimate results, and either ascribed to him the tame attributes of the commonplace and prosaic, or disparaged his great qualities and exploitations by ascribing to them no higher qualities than a cheap attribute of vapid and insipid goodness.”
After spending the night in Danville, Lincoln boarded a train on May 27, accompanied by a small entourage of young lawyers and journalists following him on the journey to Bloomington, where the convention of a new political party would be held. Since railroad track was laid across the state he took the train using a free pass for regional lines. The group reached Decatur in the late afternoon. There was no train to Bloomington until the morning. “A considerable portion of the day remained before us and the company kept well together, strolling around the town,” recalled J.O. Cunningham, the editor of the Urbana Union. Standing in front of the courthouse, Lincoln declared that it was “the exact spot where I stood when we moved from Indiana twenty-six years ago.” He had come in an oxen-drawn wagon to Illinois in 1830, in a migrating family of thirteen, of which only his father, Thomas, was an immediate relative. The rest were his stepmother, her children and relatives, and his cousins of the Hanks branch of his mother’s family. Leaving Decatur behind, they settled in Cole County, where Lincoln departed to set off on his own until he landed in New Salem. His father had rented him out as a laborer in Indiana, collecting his wages. “I used to be a slave,” Lincoln would say in 1856. But he turned twenty-one in Illinois, freed from his semiliterate father’s control. “No, I didn’t know I had sense enough to be a lawyer then,” he joked to Whitney.
“Most men forget, or at best have but a hazy abiding consciousness of their experiences, after passing through and beyond them,” wrote Henry B. Rankin later, a clerk in the Lincoln-Herndon law office. “With very few are they available immediately when needed. Not so with Lincoln. His whole varied past life was with him an active, vivid, present asset upon which he could depend and draw on effectively at any moment when he needed to use those experiences as resources for any present emergency. Present day psychologists divide life into the conscious and subconscious. If they be correct, Mr. Lincoln’s subconsciousness must have been located in the tips of his fingers and tongue, and not hidden away in the silences of the grey matter of any subconscious existence. He was certainly most alertly conscious in every present moment of all that, in the past, had ever existed in his mental or emotional being.”
With daylight remaining Lincoln led his traveling group with him into the woods by the Sangamon River. He was no longer thinking about his origins but his future. “Here, seated upon a fallen tree,” wrote Cunningham, “Mr. Lincoln talked freely as he had during the afternoon, of his hopes and fears for the coming convention, and of his earnest wish that the Whig element of the southern counties might be well represented there. He was among political friends, there being several lawyers and editors who sympathized politically with him, and he did not attempt to conceal fears and misgivings entertained by him as to the outcome of the gathering. He was well assured that the radical element of the northern counties would be there in force, and feared the effect upon the conservative element of the central and southern parts of the State. It was for the latter he seemed most concerned.”
The convention would begin in two days, but Lincoln was staring into a glass darkly. He did not know who would arrive there, whether the disparate delegates would come together and depart prepared to do battle as a unified political party that had no prior existence, no agreed upon antecedents or icons, and no previously acknowledged leader to lead them out of the wilderness. Lincoln’s anxieties were small and large, tactical and strategic, personal and political.
Lincoln was a man of the party, a thorough partisan, but now without a party. “I am a Whig,” he wrote his old friend Joshua Speed in 1855, “but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” He had been trained since he was a young man in New Salem in the strictures of party loyalty. His mentor and surrogate father, Bowling Green, the justice of the peace, taught him the basics, encouraged him to read the law, nursed him through his depressions, and boosted him to run for the state legislature. But when Green broke with the party on an issue, Lincoln joined in declining to slate him for office. After Green suddenly died from a stroke, Lincoln was too grief stricken to deliver more than a tearful mumbled eulogy. Lincoln, who had tried being a surveyor and owning a store, studied the law to advance himself in politics. He was the protégé of John Todd Stuart, a leading lawyer of Springfield and state legislator, and learned the mechanics of favors in what was called “log rolling” to pass legislation. By the age of
twenty-seven, Lincoln became the floor leader of the Whigs, chief of “the Junto,” and instrumental in moving the capital from Vandalia to Springfield. In the first national campaign of the party for “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” in 1840 he had achieved pride of place as a presidential elector. He knew the intricacies of vote counting and party allegiance in every town and county. By arranging the convention system to control nominations for elective office he arranged for himself to become a congressman. But he had only one term, made little impression, failed to win a federal patronage position from the incoming Whig administration despite his extensive lobbying, and retreated into his law practice. His political prospects vanished partly for having spoken against the Mexican War. And then the party to which he had pledged his devotion broke into drifting pieces after being swamped in the election of 1852.
Lincoln had just run in early 1855 to become the U.S. senator as the Whig candidate. He had more of the votes in the state legislature than the other two candidates—the incumbent Democratic governor Joel Matteson, an ally of Douglas, and Illinois Supreme Court Judge Lyman Trumbull, an antislavery Democrat—but not enough for a majority. When Matteson began bribing legislators, Lincoln threw his votes to Trumbull. (Mary Lincoln never spoke again to Trumbull’s wife, Julia, her longtime friend.) Lincoln’s self-sacrifice was the last rite of the Whig Party. It also ingratiated him to the splintered-off antislavery Democrats. Trumbull especially owed him an enormous debt.
There was at the beginning of 1856 only one political party in Illinois, the Democratic Party of Stephen A. Douglas. The rest was flotsam and jetsam, fragments of wreckage. The old Whig Party had no cause, no principle, no chance of winning offices, nothing to hold it together, in short, no further reason for existence. Yet some Old Whigs preferred the lost party that had never quite cohered and could not be restored. They wanted the party as it was, though it was rarely a winning party. They held on to the identity even tighter as it faded, some because it was familiar in a world of unknowns, some out of repulsion of Democrats of any kind, some out of hatred of abolitionists, and some out of accumulated wounds, slights, and resentments. Some clung to the disappearing party’s central organizing idea that held together its Northern and Southern wings, the avoidance of principle on slavery. Some joined the American Party, or the Know Nothings, who would bar any but native-born Protestants from holding public office, a more potent nationalist nostalgia defined against the wave of immigrants. Some antislavery Democrats for their part detested Douglas yet remained wary of their old opponents. Abolitionists frightened Old Whigs and Democrats alike. Lincoln had contempt for the bigotry of the Know Nothings, but would say nothing in public to offend them, many of them Whigs he knew well, hoping they would become exhausted. He felt he needed them in the long run. His plan was not to concede to their nativism, but wait for their movement to collapse or be destroyed. Without leaving fingerprints, Lincoln used his political surrogates to undermine them wherever he could. Many of the Old Whigs, he feared, might either go with the Know Nothings or the Democrats. For all he knew the Republican Party could be a failed experiment.
Illinois was the last large state in which the Republican Party was organized, lagging behind, more fractionalized than the others. With the influx of German immigration and the explosive growth of the city of Chicago the state’s social composition was rapidly changing. Until the early 1850s, northern Illinois had been sparsely populated and of little political weight. The Whigs had been rooted in southern and central Illinois in a population originally drawn from poor whites of Kentucky like Lincoln himself. And the balance of power still favored the Democrats, as it always had. Illinois had never voted in a presidential election for the Whig candidate.
Before the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the political antislavery movement in Illinois was negligible. “Up to that date,” wrote J.O. Cunningham, an antislavery newspaper editor, “no ballot had ever been cast in perhaps a majority of the counties of the State for the candidates of the ‘Liberty’ or ‘Free Soil’ party, and such as had been cast, not exceeding 6 per cent of the entire vote of the State, were in the northern counties; so that slavery agitation before the latter date, had prevailed only within a few of the counties.”
After Lincoln delivered his speech in the Hall of Representatives in the State Capitol on October 4, 1854, against the Nebraska Act, a small gaggle of abolitionists approached him to ask if he would join their meeting that night of a group they called the Republican Party. He explained he had legal business in another county. The group put his name on its State Central Committee anyway, but Lincoln declined to attend a November meeting. He explained to one of its members, Ichabod Codding, a minister and abolitionist, “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party; but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not at all satisfactory to that party.”
“Finding himself drifting about with the disorganized elements that floated together after the angry political waters had subsided,” wrote Herndon, “it became apparent to Lincoln that if he expected to figure as a leader he must take a stand himself. Mere hatred of slavery and opposition to the injustice of the Kansas-Nebraska legislation were not all that were required on him. He must be a Democrat, Know-Nothing, Abolitionist, or Republican, or forever float about in the great political sea without compass, rudder, or sail. At length he declared himself.”
But after his failed run for the Senate, through 1855, Lincoln’s seeming indecision was mainly the result of his close reading of the fugue state of politics, a period characterized by dissociation and disorder. Old identities had melted but newer ones were not solid. During this confused interregnum, Lincoln was in touch with leaders of all factions who were considering the possibility of “fusionism.” Among them was one who had asked him to join the Republicans. Owen Lovejoy, the evangelical abolitionist, whose brother Elijah P. Lovejoy, the antislavery editor, was the first martyr of the antislavery cause in 1837 in Alton, Illinois, when he was murdered defending his printing press. “I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,” Owen pledged over Elijah’s body. Lincoln wrote him on August 11, 1855, to argue why it was premature to proclaim a new party. His objection was purely strategic.
Not even you are more anxious to prevent the extension of slavery than I; and yet the political atmosphere is such, just now, that I fear to do anything, lest I do wrong. Know-nothingism has not yet entirely tumbled to pieces—nay, it is even a little encouraged by the late elections in Tennessee, Kentucky & Alabama. Until we can get the elements of this organization, there is not sufficient materials to successfully combat the Nebraska democracy with. We can not get them so long as they cling to a hope of success under their own organization; and I fear an open push by us now, may offend them, and tend to prevent our ever getting them. About us here, they are mostly my old political and personal friends; and I have hoped their organization would die out without the painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists. Indeed I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men. I have no objection to “fuse” with any body provided I can fuse on ground which I think is right; and I believe the opponents of slavery extension could now do this, if it were not for this K. N. ism.
Lincoln’s letter showed his political state of mind even before he had committed himself to a new course. His willingness to treat Owen Lovejoy as a reasonable partner rather than a radical figure of scorn, like many of Lincoln’s Old Whig friends, such as David Davis, for whom the mention of Lovejoy aroused hate “with a burning intensity,” already set him apart.
Since 1854, Herndon had assured abolitionists in Illinois who were unfamiliar and wary of Lincoln about his true feelings. He told Zebina Eastman, editor of the abolitionist new
spaper Free West, published in Chicago, who distrusted “professions of mere politicians,” that Lincoln was “a natural-born antislavery man” and “all right.”
By the end of the year, over the protests of some of his closest Old Whig colleagues, particularly John Todd Stuart, Lincoln accepted an invitation from a number of antislavery editors to plan the convention for a new party. On February 22, 1856, he presided at the meeting, steering it safely through a conflict over nativism that threatened to tear the gathering apart, ruling in favor of an anti-nativist resolution proposed by the editor George Schneider of the German language Illinois Staats-Zeitung.
Herndon served as Lincoln’s useful agent in working on the new party. Lincoln’s younger law partner was both a devoted Whig and an abolitionist, a Southerner who was inspired by New Englanders beginning with his formative experience as a student at Illinois College, presided over by its president Edward Beecher of the famous theological and antislavery family. Herndon struck up a correspondence with Theodore Parker, “my Ideal,” whose writings he passed on to Lincoln. Named along with Lincoln as an executive committee member of the new party from Springfield, Herndon wrote Parker on April 28, 1856, “I hope to live to see the day when I can make slavery feel my influence. That shall be the one object of my life.” When the news of the assault on Sumner reached Springfield, Herndon decided to send Sumner a letter. “The people are assaulted through you,” he wrote. “A feeling, wild and deep is aroused here.”
All the Powers of Earth Page 25
