At the editors’ organizing meeting at Decatur, on February 22, 1856, Lincoln turned aside an effort to nominate him for governor and instead advanced the name of Bissell. “If I should be chosen the Democrats would say, ‘it was nothing more than an attempt to resurrect the dead body of the old Whig party.’ I would secure the vote of that party and no more and our defeat would follow as a matter of course. But, I can suggest a name that will secure not only the old Whig vote, but enough Anti-Nebraska Democrats to give us the victory. That name is Col. William H. Bissell.”
At first Bissell was receptive to Lincoln’s flattery, but on the convention’s eve he suddenly cooled. He felt that the Whigs had too much influence and “the anti Nebraska Democrats ought to have rallied, and taken the control and direction of this Bloomington Convention—made it, and its candidates, their own,” he wrote Trumbull, and therefore decided “my present inclination is to decline a nomination, should one be tendered me.” But the reluctant candidate was finally persuaded, which brightened Lincoln’s mood in anticipation of Bloomington. “Lincoln and myself had a long talk in reference to affairs,” Herndon wrote Trumbull, “and I have never seen him so sanguine of success, as in this Election—he is warm. I gathered this from him,—recollect he has been round our Judicial Circuit—,that the people are warm and full of feeling on this question—this great and mighty issue . . . never saw so much ‘dogged determination’ to fight it out;—that the Democrats are coming to us daily.”
Early on the morning of the 29th, Isaac N. Arnold, a Chicago lawyer and a former Democratic legislator turned Free Soiler, stood at the top of the main staircase of Pike House to read Chicago newspaper accounts of the Ruffians’ assault on Lawrence, Kansas, “with almost tragic emphasis,” which served “to inflame the sentiment of listening delegates and others in attendance upon the convention to the highest degree, even the old Whigs.”
The convention opened in Major’s Hall, the third floor above a hardware store, 270 delegates packed on benches, with Archibald Williams presiding as chairman and a roll call of the counties. From nearly all the southern counties not a single delegate answered. When Lawrence County was called, no one responded. “Mr. Chairman,” shouted Lincoln, “let Lawrence be called again; there is a delegate in town from there, and a very good man is it, too.” So it was called again, and again it was met with silence. Its delegate, Jesse K. Dubois, “seeing Lovejoy and other Abolitionists there as cherished delegates, he, through indignation or timidity, stayed away for the time being,” recalled Whitney.
Before the chairman proceeded with the announcement of convention committees to present reports one Leander Munsell, an Old Whig former legislator, jumped the gun, declaring the nomination of Bissell for governor. “The lapse from conventionalities was little noticed, for the nomination met with a tornado of second from all parts of the hall,” recalled Cunningham. Bissell’s nomination was “made by acclamation, amid a whirlwind of cheers and huzzas.” Then other candidates for state offices were named, including Jesse K. Dubois for state auditor, undoubtedly the doing of Lincoln. Dubois was still not present, though somehow after he was slated he managed to turn up.
Browning was summoned to deliver the opening speech. “His remarks were addressed mainly to the old Clay-Whigs,” reported John Locke Scripps of the Chicago Democratic Press. “He read extracts from the speeches of Henry Clay from his first entrance upon public life down to the close of his career, all of which proved him to have been steadfastly and uniformly opposed to the spread of slavery into free territory, and that had he still been upon the stage of action when his great measures of pacification—the Missouri Compromise—was ruthlessly violated, his voice and vote would have been the same in 1854, that they were in 1820.” But Browning went on “to ever remember that slavery itself was one of the compromises of the Constitution, and was sacredly protected by the supreme law.” This was not the view of Lincoln, who cited the founders in his speeches for being antislavery and believing that it would be somehow abolished.
As Browning was the safest and stodgiest speaker, the next one was the least predictable and most exciting. Owen Lovejoy delivered “a terrific declamation against slavery and all its works,” according to Medill—“the blazing meteor upon the platform,” wrote Cunningham. Then came the surprise. “Many had only known him by what his enemies had said of him and only expected to see the veritable ‘Raw Head and Bloody-Bones’ of the Abolition Ogre, who surely must be of kin to ‘Auld Clootie.’ ” But Lovejoy proved himself a strategic politician, not just a preacher. He explained that he was opposed to slavery’s extension—“that was all.” He embraced the platform. He did not make radical demands. He did not use his moral prestige with his followers as a lever for disillusionment. “He broke down much of the unreasonable prejudice against himself and secured for himself a hearing before an audience in Illinois without danger of insult, a treatment he could not, before then, expect.” He was, the Democratic Press reported, “determined that the cause with which he was identified should not be injured.”
Unexpectedly, James S. Emery, a participant at the convention from Lawrence, along with Sara Robinson and Andrew Reeder, was summoned to the platform to speak. Emery was a justice of the peace and an editor whose printing press had been destroyed in the Ruffians’ rampage. Medill of the Tribune had tapped him on the shoulder and sent him up to the podium while the resolutions committee was meeting out of the room, “adding that I must stop when I saw the committee come in, as it had been arranged to have ‘a fellow up here from Springfield, Abe Lincoln, make a speech. He is the best stump-speaker in Sangamon county.’ ” Emery delivered compelling eyewitness stories of “Bleeding Kansas,” “with language severe and almost intemperate appeals for armed interference,” according to Cunningham. During his vehement talk, Emery felt himself distracted, scanning the audience “trying to pick out Mr. Lincoln.” Abruptly, the resolutions committee appeared and Emery’s blast ended.
“As I stepped aside, Mr. Lincoln was called for from all sides,” Emery recalled. “I then for the first time, and the last, fixed my eyes on the great president. I thought he was not dressed very neatly, and that his gait in walking up to the platform was sort of swinging. His hair was sort of rather rough and the stoop of his shoulders was noticeable; but what took me most was his intense serious look.”
Major’s Hall was filled with journalists, lawyers, and politicians used to making documentary records. Everyone present felt they were taking part in a momentous historical event that was a watershed in their own lives. Yet there was not one detailed account produced of Lincoln’s talk, which became known as his “Lost Speech.” “While Mr. Lincoln did not write out even a memorandum of his Bloomington speech beforehand, neither was it extemporary,” Medill wrote. “He intended days before to make it, and conned it over in his mind in outline, and gathered his facts, and arranged his arguments in regular order, and trusted to the inspiration of the occasion to furnish him the diction with which to clothe the skeleton of his great oration.”
“At first,” wrote Medill, “his voice was shrill and hesitating. There was a curious introspective look in his eyes, which lasted for a few moments. Then his voice began to move steadily and smoothly forward, and the modulations were under perfect control from thenceforward to the finish. He warmed up as he went on, and spoke more rapidly; he looked a foot taller as he straightened himself to his full height, and his eyes flashed fire; his countenance became wrapped in intense emotion; he rushed along like a thunderstorm. He prophesied war as the outcome of these aggressions, and poured forth hot denunciations upon the slave power. The convention was kept in an uproar, applauding and cheering and stamping; and this reacted on the speaker, and gave him a tongue of fire.”
Several patchy descriptions of the speech were published immediately afterward. The editor of the Alton Courier, George T. Brown, reported that Lincoln “enumerated the pressing reasons for the present movement” and “was here ready to fuse with anyo
ne who would unite with him to oppose [the] slave power.” The editor of the Belleville Advocate, Nathaniel Niles, described how “his wonderful eloquence electrified the audience of two thousand men.” The Bloomington Pantagraph reported that “without being invidious, we must say that Mr. Lincoln . . . surpassed all others—even himself. His points were unanswerable, and the force and power of his appeals, irresistible.”
But Lincoln’s speech was never contemporaneously published and recollections of it differed. Whitney claimed decades later to have reconstructed it, but his version was not accepted. When the McLean County Historical Society based in Bloomington held a conference in 1900 on the 1856 convention at which surviving participants gave their reminiscences, the society concluded: “This has been called the ‘Lost Speech’ of Mr. Lincoln. Since then portions of this speech have lingered in men’s minds like some half-forgotten music which one thinks he can recall, but regretfully finds it an elusive dream.”
It seems likely though that two remembered passages were accurate. Cunningham recalled: “Seeming to know that there had been wild talk about people going to Kansas armed with Sharpe’s rifles, with which to settle the contentions there in issue, he began most gently with a rebuke for such appeals to violence. In words he deprecated the use of force as a means of settling the issue, and concluded this part of his speech with these words as nearly as I remember them: ‘No, my friends, I’ll tell you what we will do, we will wait until November, and then we will shoot paper ballots at them,’ referring, of course, to the coming presidential election and to the ballots to be then cast.” A number of others who were there also recalled Lincoln speaking as though to Southerners and saying, “We won’t go out of the Union, and you shan’t!”
About his closing remark about the Union, Cunningham wrote, “This was said with great deliberation, when he had raised his figure to its greatest height, his eyes, usually so mild and playful, now flashing wild determination, and with vehement gestures with his head and arms. The effect upon his audience was shown by the applause with which it was greeted, amid which the orator withdrew from the stand, and the work of the convention was over. There were then no Whigs, Democrats, nor Free-Soilers, but men of every shade had been fused into a conquering phalanx.”
Herndon’s reaction captured not only his enthusiasm of the moment but also his sense that Lincoln had entered into a new phase, growing in stature before his eyes. “I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of this life,” he insisted. “Heretofore he had simply argued the slavery question on grounds of policy,—the statesman’s grounds,—never reaching the question of the radical and the eternal right. . . . I attempted for about fifteen minutes as was usual with me then to take notes, but at the end of that time I threw pen and paper away and lived only in the inspiration of the hour. If Mr. Lincoln was six feet, four inches high usually, at Bloomington that day he was seven feet.”
A number of observers believed that the radical tenor of Lincoln’s effort was the reason it was not fully documented. “My belief is that,” wrote Medill, “after Mr. Lincoln cooled down, he was rather pleased that his speech had not been reported, as it was too radical in expression on the slavery question for the digestion of central and southern Illinois at that time, and that he preferred to let it stand as a remembrance in the minds of his audience. But, be that as it may, the effect of it was such on his hearers that he bounded to the leadership of the new Republican party of Illinois, and no man afterwards ever thought of disputing that position with him.”
Another delegate, Eugene F. Baldwin, later the founder of the Peoria Journal and Peoria Star newspapers, recalled that “the great mass of the leaders felt that Lincoln made too radical a speech and they did not want it produced for fear it would damage the party. Lincoln himself said he had put his foot into it and asked the reporters to simply report the meeting and not attempt to record his words and they agreed to it.”
The controversy flared for years about Lincoln’s language at the convention, especially his use of the phrase “a house divided, half slave, half free.” According to Leonard Swett, one of Lincoln’s coterie, the conservative T. Lyle Dickey insisted that Lincoln first publicly spoke of a “house divided” in the Bloomington speech, not as generally believed in 1858. “I was inclined at the time to believe these words were hastily and inconsiderately uttered, but subsequent facts have convinced me they were deliberate and had been matured,” Swett told Herndon. “Judge T.L. Dickey says that at Bloomington at the first Republican Convention, in 1856, he uttered the same sentences in a Speech delivered there, and that after the meeting was over, he (Dickey) called his attention to these remarks. Lincoln justified himself in making them, by stating they were true; but finally at Dickey’s urgent request, he pronounced that for his sake, or upon his advice, he would not repeat them.”
Lincoln at Bloomington put himself at the head of the party that more than anyone else he had created. From the moment he decided to throw himself into the task his abilities were tested. The party had to draw the allegiance of German revolutionaries and abolitionist clergymen as well as suspicious Old Whigs and dissident Democrats, all the while chipping away at Know Nothings. He was able to hold together the odd collection of forces through skills acquired in a lifetime in politics. But the convention was more than a triumph of mechanics. Lincoln had to harmonize the themes to the varied constituencies. He had to frame a platform broad enough to encompass the spectrum of factions and yet narrow enough not to lose viability. Ultimately, he had to accomplish the feat himself. His performance as a speaker aroused the delegates to a novel state of unity. Still, the hazards were hardly removed, and old partisan identities were not easily overcome.
Lincoln was almost completely preoccupied with coaxing recalcitrant Old Whigs. “Your party is so mad at Douglas for wrecking his party that it will gulp down anything,” he told former Democrats Norman Judd and Ebenezer Peck, “but our party [Whig] is fresh from Kentucky and must not be forced to radical measures; the Abolitionists will go with us anyway, and your wing of the Democratic party the same, but the Whigs hold the balance of power and will be hard to manage, anyway. Why, I had a hard time to hold Dubois when he found Lovejoy and Codding here; he insisted on going home at once.” The difficulties Lincoln encountered in the making of the Illinois Republican Party were a rehearsal for constantly rising political complexity and adversity in which his more conservative friends would threaten his fragile creation.
But Dubois was finally won over by Lincoln’s speech. As he walked out of the hall he turned to Whitney and said in a “burst of enthusiasm,” “Whitney, that is the greatest speech ever made in Illinois and it puts Lincoln on the track for the Presidency.” Whitney claimed to have related the remark to Lincoln, the first suggestion he might be president, and “he walked along without straightening himself up for some thirty seconds, perhaps without saying a word; but with a thoughtful, abstracted look:—then he straightened up and immediately made a remark about some commonplace subject, having no reference to the subject we had been considering.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MISS FANCY
The Democratic Party convention opened on June 2 in Cincinnati, within days of the Bloomington event. It was a three-way contest. Franklin Pierce believed he had earned a second term. He certainly wanted another one. His remaining pockets of loyalty within the party were dependent on his distribution of fishes and loaves. “The strength of Pierce consisted in ‘possession,’ in the enormous amount of patronage at his disposal, in the fact that he presided in the grand central office of the wire-workers of the best drilled party in the country, and was commander-in-chief of office holders,” wrote the journalist Murat Halstead. But the toxicity of Pierce’s administration was lethal. The events of late May—from the sacking of Lawrence to the caning of Sumner—were hammer blows to his hopes. “The Kansas outrages are all imputable to him, and if he [is] not called to answer for them here, ‘In Hell they’ll roas
t him like a herring,’ ” wrote Benjamin B. French, Pierce’s commissioner of public buildings, who became disillusioned and joined the Republicans. John W. Forney, editor of the pro-administration Washington Union, attributed Pierce’s demise to the assault on Sumner. “I have always believed that that outrage secured the nomination for Buchanan,” he wrote. Forney had been forced off the newspaper and become one of Buchanan’s chief campaign managers.
James Buchanan, Portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy
Alexander H. Stephens, the former Whig congressman from Georgia, who labored for the old party with his colleague Lincoln in 1848 but had abandoned the Whigs, claimed that Pierce’s favoritism toward the Softs of New York was the source of his unpopularity. “It was not because he ‘shot down’ the abolition traitors in Kansas,” he wrote, “but rather because he ‘shot down’ all the true friends of the Kansas Bill in the Northern States two years ago—not with gunpowder it is true but with executive patronage by putting their enemies in power over their necks and heads.” But Stephens also blamed the troubles in Kansas on Pierce. “I believe most of the difficulties we now have in Kansas have arisen from the fickleness, weakness, folly and vacillations of his policy in regard to that territory.”
Stephen A. Douglas’s strategy was to combine with Pierce until Buchanan was broken, shunt Pierce aside, and seize the prize. Douglas’s announcement of his candidacy was an embittering shock to Pierce, who thought he had heard Douglas say he would support him against Buchanan. Douglas strutted around Washington as though he were the inevitable nominee, a self-conscious performance. Walking into the National Hotel in May he happened to encounter James Buchanan, who in his inimitably condescending manner spoke of his own coming election. “I expect to choose my Constitutional advisers soon,” tartly replied Douglas, “and am most happy thus to receive your acceptance in advance.” He and Pierce were, according to Francis P. Blair, “in Cahoot—each calculating that the defeat of Buck in the Convention was essential to give the least Chance for either of them.”
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