All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Lincoln, the Old Whig turned Republican, focused on Old Whigs supporting either Buchanan or Fillmore. As they flew off in all directions he wondered how he might neutralize them or bring them into the orbit of the new party. Lincoln’s political calculus was based largely on previous Illinois election results, refreshed by the intelligence he received from political people he knew around the state. In the presidential election of 1852 Pierce won by ten points. In the midterm elections for the Congress in 1854 candidates opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act gained four seats, but the Democrats still controlled six. Lincoln understood that the newly organized Republican Party commanded less allegiance than the dissolved Whig Party. Throughout central and southern Illinois the centrifugal force of Whig disintegration was accelerating—and not to the benefit of the Republicans regardless of what they called themselves. Even in Sangamon County, which had been the Whig core in the state, the Old Whigs held out from the Republicans. The Know Nothings there amounted to the Old Whig Party in nativist clothing. Lincoln could see the politics slipping away from the Republicans, failing to become a coherent force while the Know Nothings held the Old Whigs and the Democrats prevailed once again. Lincoln felt the Republicans losing not gaining ground. But his finely attuned frame of reference was based on the old balances of power. His arithmetic metrics of addition and subtraction from the existing parties projected a zero-sum game that was radically in flux.

  At the beginning of June, he did not anticipate the upsurge of enthusiasm for the Republicans or factor in the tangible reality of the explosive growth of Chicago. Though Lincoln took on many railroad cases, he was just grasping how profoundly the industrial revolution would politically transform Illinois. In 1850, the population of Chicago was 28,269 and one railroad passed through it. By 1855, the population had nearly tripled to 83,500 and it was the hub for ten railroads, the crossroads between East and West. Stephen A. Douglas, the sponsor of the Illinois Central Railroad, had become a Chicagoan, moved his residence to the new metropolis, and champion of its industrial development. Lincoln came and went occasionally from Chicago and could see the extraordinary change with his own eyes. Neither Douglas nor Lincoln, however, fully understood that just as Douglas was a founding father of the city of Chicago he was also creating the basis for the Republican Party. The world that was coming into being had only surfaced in vague outline.

  At the Republican Party organizing meeting on February 22, 1856, Lincoln had stated there could be no hope to “resurrect the dead body of the old Whig party.” But even after the Bloomington convention, the situation remained so delicate he couldn’t safely utter the word “Republican.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  VICE PRESIDENT LINCOLN

  The news of Buchanan’s nomination came yesterday,” Lincoln nervously wrote Trumbull on June 7, “and a good many Whigs, of conservative feelings, and slight pro-slavery proclivities, withal, are inclining to go for him, and will do it, unless the Anti-Nebraska nomination shall be such as to divert them.”

  Supreme Court Associate Justice John McLean

  Lincoln was fixated on his former party mates. “Now there is a grave question to be considered. Nine tenths of the Anti-Nebraska votes have to come from old Whigs. In setting stakes, is it safe to totally disregard them? Can we possibly win, if we do so? So far they have been disregarded. I need not point out the instances.” But Lincoln proposed a solution—a candidate—a man who would have an appeal to the Old Whigs. “The man to effect that object is Judge McLean”—Supreme Court Associate Justice John McLean—“and his nomination would save every Whig, except such as have already gone over hook and line”—and Lincoln reeled off a list of defectors who “will heartily go for McLean, but will every one go for Buchanan, as against Chase, Banks, Seward, [Frank] Blair [Jr.] or Fremont.” Lincoln the former surveyor laid out the limits of political possibility as he saw it. “I think they would stand Blair or Fremont for Vice-President—but not more.” He was thinking of them as running mates for his candidate.

  Lincoln had been chosen as a delegate to the Republican convention but was committed to cases on the judicial circuit. Trumbull had also been selected. Lincoln’s letter convinced him that he should go. “Your letter just received decides the question,” he wrote Lincoln on June 15. “I will go in the morning, and do what I can to have a conservative man nominated and conservative measures adopted. I have no personal feeling about candidates, but want the strongest man whose sentiments are right, and that Judge McLean is that man, all things considered, I have very little doubt.”

  John McLean, seventy-one years old, had an impressive appearance; his “features resembled those of George Washington,” according to one historian. He was reserved, dignified, and learned. A contemporary chronicler noted “the diligent labors of his energetic and cultivated mind.” He considered himself in the tradition of John Marshall and Joseph Story, a firm supporter of federal authority, not a strict constructionist of the states’ rights school. He was the only justice on the Supreme Court with antislavery sentiments. But time and again, to the consternation of abolitionists, he had ruled in favor of existing laws upholding slavery. In 1842 he upheld the constitutionality of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 in Prigg v. Pennsylvania and the following year ruled in Jones v. Van Zandt against a poor white Ohio farmer who sheltered a runaway slave. “[I]f convictions . . . of what is right or wrong are to be substituted as a rule of action in disregard of the law, we shall soon be without law and protection,” he wrote. The Van Zandt case became a celebrated cause for abolitionists. Salmon Chase, assisted by William Seward, argued for the defense. Harriet Beecher Stowe had transparently fictionalized the figure of the saintly Van Zandt as a martyr in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. McLean’s adherence to the rule of abhorrent law continued in the 1853 case Miller v. McQuerry in which he decided that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was constitutional and remanded a fugitive to his Kentucky master. Yet McLean was opposed to the extension of slavery in the territories. He also believed that blacks in free states were free, the issue at stake in the impending Dred Scott case. He had already written his decision, though the court was still deliberating. Frustrated that he could not make his decision public, he published a letter in the National Intelligencer, the traditional Whig newspaper in Washington, laying out his argument that “Congress has no power to institute slavery in the Territories,” and therefore could not exist there. McLean’s complex positions made him a conflicted political character. Radical abolitionists denounced him for his constitutional decisions on the legality of slavery while he was an outlier on the court for opposing slavery’s extension.

  McLean was more than a jurist on the high bench; he was an ambitious politician beneath his black robe. John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary in April 1833 that McLean “thinks of nothing but the Presidency by day and dreams of nothing else by night.” A decade later, in April 1843, Adams recorded his view of McLean’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination: “McLean is but a second edition of John Tyler—vitally Democratic, double-dealing, and hypocritical.” Adams’s harsh opinion of McLean, who was a former cabinet member of his administration, was a scar from McLean’s decades in political wars.

  McLean climbed the rungs of a lengthy political ladder to attain his eminence. He began as the publisher of a newspaper in Lebanon, Ohio, which he translated into a job at the U.S. Land Office in Cincinnati, which within a year became his platform for becoming a congressman, which in turn within two years lifted him to a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court, which he used to campaign for James Monroe for president, who appointed him commissioner of the Public Land Office and after another year postmaster general. President John Quincy Adams in the spirit of the nonparty Era of Good Feelings retained McLean in his office. When the election of 1828 came around, McLean displayed his nonpartisanship to a fault, pointedly refusing to use his political office to political effect for Adams—behaving “perfidiously,” as Secretary of State Henry Clay told Adams. The new president,
Andrew Jackson, who believed in the dictum “To the victor belong the spoils,” was appreciative of McLean’s active indifference to Adams during the campaign, but would not dare reappoint him. McLean had signaled to Jackson a year earlier, “I am the servant of the people, not the administration. The patronage placed in my hands is to be used for the public benefit.” Jackson feared McLean might take his high-mindedness seriously beyond damaging Adams. So he named the serious man to the serious position of associate justice on the Supreme Court, which Jackson thought the least consequential branch of government and would cause the least trouble.

  From the sanctuary of the court McLean ran for president in every cycle, putting his name forward five times before four different parties publicly and one party surreptitiously. He first tried for the nomination of the Anti-Masonic Party, gravitated to the Whigs, and then sought elevation as the candidate of the Free Soil Party in 1848. After abandoning the Whigs he could not return to them in 1852, but in early 1853, just after the landslide election of 1852 that buried them, Orville Hickman Browning, an Old Whig and Lincoln ally, wrote McLean, telling him that the Illinois Whigs were searching for a candidate who could unite “all the elements of the Whig party,” and that the growing opinion was that he was that man.

  It was more than a little ironic that McLean, the Democratic warhorse who remade himself into a man above politics as he avidly pursued it and was distrusted as a bounder by Whigs when he made his initial attempt at the Whig nomination in 1836, was touted as the last refuge for Old Whigs within the new Republican Party. After the Know Nothings strongly emerged in the 1854 elections, McLean thought his opportunity might lie in gaining its nomination. The Know Nothings, after all, seemed to be the strongest new party and was drawing the Whigs to it. Its antipolitical and antiparty claims against the decadent existing parties also appealed to McLean’s long-standing pretense. He “obsequiously showered letters on Know Nothings in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan,” according to the historian Michael Holt, “praising their organization as ‘the party of the people’ that could save the government from ‘cliques,’ ‘demagogues,’ and ‘political traders and gamesters,’ and warning them to ‘suffer not the political hacks of any party to enter into your organization or to control your action.’ ” But McLean was too cautious and calibrated and the Know Nothings turned to Fillmore.

  McLean’s ambiguity placed him more or less where Lincoln thought the center ought to be in the Republican Party in order to attract the Old Whigs. When he was a young man Henry Clay was his “beau ideal,” but he did not back him for the nomination in 1840 or 1848 because he thought military heroes with less substance but broader appeal were stronger candidates. McLean, said Lincoln in 1848, was “not a winning card.” In 1855 Lincoln watched McLean perform in the Manny case and came away distinctly unimpressed. “Judge McLean is a man of considerable vigor of mind but no perception at all,” he told Whitney. “Point your finger at him and also a darning needle, he would not know which was the sharpest.” Lincoln still thought he had the best chance to win, or if not to take the prize certainly to win over Old Whigs. Browning held the same view. “We have many, very many, tenderfooted Whigs, who are frightened by ugly names, that could not be carried for Fremont, but who would readily unite with us upon McLean,” he wrote Trumbull on May 19, 1856, about the candidacy of Senator John C. Fremont of California.

  “The fact is,” wrote Murat Halstead, “that the McLean movement is an attempt made by the antediluvian Whigs who have been placed in Congress by the Republican movement, to reorganize the defunct Whig Party under a thin disguise of Republicanism, to consist solely of talk about the Missouri Compromise.” But McLean’s support was broader than that and his organization weaker. The abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings and the National Era editor Gamaliel Bailey were for McLean. These men were Ohioans, knew McLean and Chase, whom they were decidedly not endorsing. McLean’s candidacy fatally undercut Chase’s in Ohio, and by the same token Chase’s weakened McLean’s. Without control over their state’s delegation neither stood a realistic chance of gaining the nomination.

  The natural candidate for the Republican nomination of 1856 decided not to enter the field. Thurlow Weed had advised William Seward it was not his year. The Republicans would not win, and he should reserve himself for the next time. According to Weed’s memoir, “It was with difficulty that he prevailed upon his friends to bide their time until the next national canvass. He reasoned that the Know Nothings, were Mr. Seward nominated, would ensure the election of Mr. Buchanan. Even as against any other Republican, Mr. Buchanan was almost sure to be elected, and, if elected, Mr. Weed thought, absolutely certain to make so many mistakes that nothing could prevent Republican ascendancy in 1860. It was only four years to wait, and under the circumstances nothing was to be gained by precipitancy.” Of the other possibilities Weed was opposed to Chase and McLean. Weed told one associate that McLean was a “ ‘white-liver’d hollow-hearted Janus-faced rascal.’ . . . I think he prefixed ‘d——d.’ ”

  The Republican convention opened on June 17 at the Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia, an “immense hall . . . crowded in every corner,” reported Halstead, but “badly ventilated; the air outside was sultry, and the heat within soon became terrible.” Francis P. Blair, the man usually behind the scenes, wandered visibly among the delegates as the conductor of the candidacy of John C. Frémont. “He is a little old gentleman,” Halstead observed of Blair, “thin, slender and feeble in appearance, yet moving about with considerable activity . . . his head is too big for his body, and his hat too big for his head. He is treated with distinguished consideration, and the mention of his name is invariably followed by uproarious applause.”

  Blair had originally tried to recruit Thomas Hart Benton, his old Jacksonian “Kitchen Cabinet” intimate, for the nomination, but the cantankerous Benton was determined to fight out his own Missouri war with his enemies within the Democratic Party to the bitter end. So Blair decided that the best man was Benton’s son-in-law, the youthful and dashing idol of the West, Colonel John C. Frémont, famed for his expeditions, accompanied by his legendary scout Kit Carson, exploring the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Oregon Trail, reaching San Francisco Bay, which he called the Golden Gate. An officer of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, Frémont was a mathematician, artist, and scientist, who identified new plant species, and was awarded “the great golden medal” for his research by Alexander von Humboldt on behalf of the King of Prussia and received a tribute from the Royal Geographical Society of London. His best-selling account of his adventures published before the California Gold Rush redefined the Great American Desert as El Dorado. He led the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846 to conquer California, became extremely wealthy from his ownership of mines, and was elected the new state’s U.S. senator.

  Frémont carried the aura of a romantic military hero, riding in on clouds of glory, not the creature of dank political party clubhouses. He was “the Pathfinder,” given the sobriquet by the newspapers, lifted from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1840 novel of that title about Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking, Hawk Eye, and at last “the Pathfinder,” Fenimore Cooper’s natural man of the American wilderness. “ ‘Fear nothing, young woman,’ said the hunter. . . . I am a man well known in all these parts, and perhaps one of my names may have reached your ears. By the Frenchers and the red-skins on the other side of the Big Lakes, I am called La Longue Carabine; by the Mohicans, a just-minded and upright tribe, what is left of them, Hawk Eye; while the troops and rangers along this side of the water call me Pathfinder, inasmuch as I have never been known to miss one end of the trail, when there was a Mingo, or a friend who stood in need of me, at the other.”

  Frémont fulfilled the dreams of Democrats for another Jackson and Whigs for another proto-Jackson in the winning tradition of William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. His time as senator was fortunately brief and his record negligible. Horace Greeley observed “a candidate mu
st have a slim record in these times,” and he moved the Tribune behind Frémont’s candidacy on the convention’s eve. Weed and Seward jumped on board. So did Henry Wilson and Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts. The bandwagon was rolling. Frémont was more than the available man. At forty-three years old the youngest man ever to run for the presidency, he had more than a seemingly clean slate to gain support from factions trailing the baggage of their past. He was a new man for a new party. He was brilliant and intrepid, a scholar and a soldier in the battle on the frontier for limitless progress. “His manner was refined and dignified,” John Bigelow, editor of the New York Post, recalled. That Frémont was also without political instinct, arrogant, impetuous, vainglorious, self-seeking, thin-skinned, financially shady, and incapable of working cooperatively went unexplored in the euphoric moment. Frémont appeared on the horizon as a shining mythic icon. In any case, Blair was his manager. Before the balloting began it was apparent that Frémont “had a clear majority,” according to Halstead.