CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE GREAT AWAKENING
Judge David Davis, the imperious ruler of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, from his great mansion in Bloomington reflected upon the proceedings of the Republican convention at Philadelphia and was not pleased. “The Judge thinks Fremont a very unfit person to be run for President, and that if elected the Union will not last through his administration,” Browning wrote in his diary on June 14. Davis “had no hope of good coming from Fremont’s election—that he had no qualifications for the office—that money and corruption had been freely used to procure his nomination, and that he was in the hands of, and would be controlled, by Blair, Greely, Wilson, Thurlow Wead [sic] &c all of whom were corrupt. That Buchannan was a man of ability, and considerable statesmanship, but that he was timid—lacked nerve & would probably fall under the influence of the ultra pro slavery men of the South.” The judge preferred the last Whig president Fillmore, but despaired. “He had more confidence in Fillmore than either of the others, but there was no chance for his election, and upon a survey of the whole ground he had but little hope for the future of our Country.”
Owen Lovejoy
Davis was used to his judgments going unchallenged and was perplexed that he could not command the political tides. He was a conflicted figure trying to hold the elements together, a Southern-raised man of Northern sympathy who had discovered his center of gravity in the Whig Party. Born into a slaveholding Maryland family, his father, a physician, died when he was a boy, and he was passed from household to household until he was shuffled off to boarding school. Educated at Kenyon College in Ohio, founded by Philander Chase, the antislavery Episcopal bishop and uncle of Salmon P. Chase, he moved as a young man to Illinois, began a law practice and real estate business that would eventually make him the largest landowner in the state. He was a stalwart Whig, who instinctively disliked Douglas and warmed to Lincoln. Davis’s judgeship was an elected position. He had started out in the legislature. He was the party power of Bloomington, but his party had disintegrated. He had complained that Springfield was “overrun with Foreigners,” but disdained the Know Nothings. He was opposed to the extension of slavery, but considered abolitionists “wild and disorganizing.” He believed that Know Nothings and abolitionists were disruptive forces that would enable Douglas and the Democrats to win. Davis saw in the defeat of McLean for the Republican nomination the final rejection of Old Whiggism and a projected version of himself.
Davis believed that the election in Illinois would turn upon the crucial swing congressional district centered on Bloomington. Northern districts would vote Republican, the southern districts Democratic. The balance of power rested in the thirteen counties in and around Bloomington, a north-south split that reflected the division within the state itself. Davis placed his hope on the nomination for Congress of a young lawyer from the coterie of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Leonard Swett. On July 2, in the town of Ottawa, a Republican convention was held that on its first ballot gave Owen Lovejoy 25 votes, Swett 18, and Jesse O. Norton, the incumbent, a Whig, 9. The Swett and Norton men hastily called for a recess. After twenty minutes the two candidates dropped out and threw their support to another Old Whig, Churchill Coffing. But the gambit backfired. Lovejoy gained five more votes, winning the nomination.
“We learned yesterday,” chortled the DeWitt Courier, a pro-Douglas Democratic newspaper, “that the Republican Convention for this District resulted in the nomination of the Rev. notorious Abolition-Banner-Trailing-Union-Sliding-Lovejoy to the utter discomfiture of Leonard Swett, and divers other good and worthy aspirants.” Davis, angered over the loss of McLean, was furious. “I subscribe to everything you say relative to the nomination of Lovejoy,” an Old Whig and former member of the legislature, J.C. Pugh, wrote him. “I can see and almost feel its disastrous and deplorable effects everywhere.”
The split over Lovejoy between the Old Whigs and the abolitionist wings that Lincoln had finessed at the Bloomington convention threatened to tear apart the infant party. But Lincoln refused to join in a factional battle of resentment. Leaving Springfield on or near the date of the district convention that chose Lovejoy, he arrived at Princeton, Lovejoy’s hometown, for a July 4th rally. He was surprised to find before him a sea of about ten thousand people. Lincoln delivered a brief history lesson about the Declaration of Independence, the Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, and Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, taking his seat to “loud and enthusiastic cheers,” according to the local newspaper, followed on the platform by Lovejoy, who held Douglas up to ridicule, comparing the “Little Giant” to a louse. The final speaker was “Old Joe” Knox, a well-known attorney, who recounted the gallantry in the Mexican War of William Bissell, the Republican candidate for governor, and how “Bissell the Lion Hearted” faced down Jefferson Davis, forcing him to withdraw his challenge of a duel, a story which “so thrilled the audience,” according to an eyewitness.
The Princeton event was the first great rally Lincoln attended after the Bloomington convention. Here there were not dozens of the curious, or even a couple hundred dutiful adherents, but thousands of people committed to a crusade. For the first time Lincoln saw for himself the spontaneous upsurge for Lovejoy and the Republicans. This excitement could not be artificially produced. It was not the result of old party men. Nor was it like the past campaigns of mass interest he had been part of before, like the first Whig one in 1840 for William Henry Harrison, based on slogans, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” and “Hard Cider and Log Cabin,” and which avoided all issues. Now the intensity came from a cause. It was not an abolitionist meeting. It was larger and broader than that. It was the sudden organic appearance of the Republican Party and the cause it represented. What Lincoln witnessed at Princeton was the beginning of a great awakening sweeping the North.
Upon his return after sharing the podium with Lovejoy, Lincoln learned of the plot of disappointed Old Whigs to break with the Republicans to launch an independent candidate against Lovejoy in the general election. The signers of the call for a bolters’ convention at Bloomington were friends of Lincoln. One was Henry Clay Whitney. Another was Asahel Gridley, a former state senator and the wealthiest man in Bloomington infamous for his irascible outbursts. (Lincoln would successfully defend him from an accusation of slander in 1859 with the argument “that the people generally know you to be impulsive and say things you do not mean, and they do not consider what you say as slander.”) Another signer was Isaac Funk, a former legislator, founder of Funk’s Grove and one of the richest men in McLean County, for whom Lincoln was attorney. This rump group intended to nominate T. Lyle Dickey, one of Davis’s close friends, as their candidate. “We are in the midst of a political tornado,” Dickey explained in a letter to his son. “The Congressional convention of Fremont men met at Ottawa on the 2d of this month nominated for Congress Rev. Owen Lovejoy, a rank old-fashioned Abolitionist. About half the delegates bolted the nomination and called another convention to nominate another candidate who would not only oppose the introduction of slavery into Kansas, but would at the same time be true to the acknowledged rights of the South under the Constitution, embracing their right to recapture runaway slaves and who in general would exercise a spirit of fidelity and fraternity to the people of the South and avoid all unnecessary cause of difference.”
Lincoln wasted little time in writing Davis. His letter of July 7 played to Davis’s sense of outrage in order to coax him away from supporting the bolters. “Dear Judge,” he wrote, “When I heard that Swett was beaten, and Lovejoy nominated, it turned me blind. I was, by invitation, on my way to Princeton; and I really thought of turning back. However, on reaching that region, and seeing the people there—their great enthusiasm for Lovejoy—considering the activity they will carry into the contest with him—and their great disappointment, if he should now be torn from them, I really think it best to let the matter stand. It is not my business to advise in the case; and if it were, I am not sure I am capable o
f giving the best advice; but I know saying what I do, will not be offensive to you. Show this to Gridley and other friends, or not, just as you may judge whether it do good or harm.” With all due deference, Lincoln put the burden of ripping apart the Republican Party on Davis. “Lincoln had a way of excepting with so much grace and deference, and so apologetically, that the Judge was rather flattered by it,” wrote Whitney. Two days later, on July 9, Lincoln sent a similar letter to Whitney: “It turned me blind when I first heard Swett was beaten, and Lovejoy nominated; but after much anxious reflection, I really believe it is best to let it stand. This, of course, I wish to be confidential.” He put the weight on Whitney, too.
Lincoln’s attitude was obliquely but apparently expressed in the Illinois State Journal, more or less his personal vehicle, which on July 7 mocked the Illinois State Register, Douglas’s paper. Under the headline, “Don’t Like It,” the Journal editorialized, “The Register does not like the nomination of Hon. Owen Lovejoy, by the anti-Nebraska party of the Third Congressional District. Having been utterly unsuccessful heretofore in pleasing our fastidious neighbors, our friends need not feel greatly disappointed that they are still as far as ever from accomplishing that result.”
Another friend of Lincoln, Jesse W. Fell, shared his open view on Lovejoy. Fell had originally backed Swett, too, but he was not prepared to let the nascent Republican Party be broken by the bolters. Fell had been responsible for Davis settling in Bloomington. He had sold his thriving law practice to him, became wealthy through real estate and railroads, founded the neighboring town of Normal, the state university, philanthropies, was an early environmentalist, the publisher of the Bloomington Weekly Pantagraph newspaper, and a Quaker who participated in the Underground Railroad. “Fell had more energy and force of character, Davis later declared, than any man he had ever known,” wrote Davis’s biographer Willard L. King. Fell was ceaseless from 1854 onward in promoting Lincoln’s political career. He urged Lincoln to stalk Douglas in order to force him to debate and he would not relent in his insistence that there should be Lincoln-Douglas debates. (Fell’s great-grandson, Adlai E. Stevenson, became governor of Illinois and was twice nominated as the Democratic candidate for president.)
The bolters’ convention met at Bloomington on July 16. Dickey was duly nominated and delivered a speech “much the same as he would have addressed the Supreme Court on a law question,” according to a report. Gridley took the platform to stir up the crowd, calling Lovejoy “a nigger thief,” adding that he wished Lovejoy had been present when Brooks assaulted Sumner. “Yes sir, with the addition that Lovejoy and Brooks had then cut each other’s throats.” Suddenly and surprisingly, Lovejoy stepped forward. He had been quietly informed to attend the meeting by Fell. “I have never spoke to his gentleman,” Lovejoy said to Gridley. “I have never injured him in thought, word or deed, and yet the best wish he has for me is that a Southern bully may cut my throat.” Replying to the accusation of being “a nigger thief,” he said, “If it is meant by that that I go to Kentucky or Missouri to entice slaves to run away, it is not true. It is not necessary for me to do that. But if you mean by that charge that when a man or woman comes to my door and asks for a cup of water and a crust of bread and that I point them to the North star, if that is what you mean, and I have had such women come to my door as white as your wife or mine, if that is what you mean, then I plead guilty.” He paused and asked, “And who of you would not do the same thing?” The meeting ended with three cheers for Lovejoy. “He killed the bolting convention movement so completely that it never wriggled after that night,” according to Ezra M. Prince, the historian of McLean County.
Two days later a ratification meeting of Lovejoy’s nomination was held in Bloomington. Gridley spoke against him, Fell for him. Lovejoy was overwhelmingly approved. On July 23, the Bloomington Pantagraph published its ringing endorsement: “We want in Congress men of ability and eloquence who may be relied on with perfect confidence to resist the extension of slavery. Nobody doubts that on this question OWEN LOVEJOY will be as true as steel.”
Dickey’s candidacy cratered. The delicate task of persuading him to face its reality fell to his friend Davis. “I did not dream that you would have taken the nomination for Congress,” he wrote Dickey on July 18, two days after Lovejoy stole the thunder at the bolters’ convention. “The readiness with which many persons support Lovejoy is surprising.” He attributed the cause to the “outrages in Kansas” and “the attack on Mr. Sumner,” which “have made abolitionists of those, who never dreamed they were drifting into it.” Davis conceded, “I think the grand reason of it all is that his views and opinions are becoming the views and opinions of a majority of the people.” He urged Dickey to quit. “We, the old Whig party, will be stricken down during this campaign. Had we not better bide our time, brush up our armor for future operations?” Stubbornly, Dickey held out until September 13, and Davis resumed surreptitious plotting against Lovejoy. On October 31, the Republican committee of Vermilion County sent a letter to the DeWitt County committee declaring its members were “mortified to know” that Davis was at the center of a “clique” “for the avowed purpose” of having Old Whigs “embittered against Mr. Lovejoy.”
Throughout the drama over Lovejoy, Lincoln attempted to find a way for the Republicans to ally with the Know Nothings without actually uniting with them. He revived a scheme from the time before the establishment of the Whig Party, in the 1836 presidential election, when the various candidates running against the Democratic ticket pledged to throw their support in the Electoral College to the one who received the most popular votes. According to Lincoln’s calculation the Republicans would outpoll the Know Nothings and ultimately be the beneficiary. He tossed the idea around with an Old Whig turned Know Nothing, James Berdan, a railroad attorney with literary polish as the friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and relation by marriage to Washington Irving. “A union of our strength, to be effected in some way, is indispensable to our carrying the State against Buchanan,” Lincoln wrote him on July 10. “The inherent obstacle to any plan of union, lies in the fact that of those Germans which we now have with us, large numbers will fall away, so soon as it is seen that their votes, cast with us, may possibly be used to elevate Mr. Fil[l]more.” Lincoln suggested “one small improvement”: “Let Fremont and Fillmore men unite on one entire ticket, with the understanding that that ticket, if elected, shall cast the vote of the State, for whichever of the two shall be known to have received the larger number of electoral votes, in the other states.” But Lincoln’s notion was inherently quixotic. Berdan lacked the influence over the other Know Nothings to make a deal. Those running the Fillmore campaign had no intention of surrendering. Meanwhile, Douglas was covertly stoking antagonism between Republicans and Know Nothings by secretly directing Democratic funds to the Weekly Native Citizen, the state’s principal Know Nothing newspaper, which promoted Fillmore.
Lincoln was aware of the rumors of payoffs to Know Nothings and Old Whigs. He felt certain his old mentor John Todd Stuart and his friend James Matheny “and the leading Fillmore men in this section were bribed by the Buchanan corruption fund,” he told Herndon, “said that he believed that the Fillmore party, i.e., leaders of it through the State, were bought and sold like hogs are sold in the market.”
Lincoln, however, kept devising new means of reaching out to Old Whigs who were for Fillmore. From his contacts across the state he obtained the names and addresses of key Fillmore men and sent them a “confidential” letter that made a tortuous argument of why they should vote for Frémont. “I understand you are a Fillmore man,” he wrote. “Let me prove to you that every vote withheld from Fremont, and given to Fillmore, in this state, actually lessens Fillmore’s chance of being President. Suppose Buchanan gets all the slave states, and Pennsylvania, and any other one state besides; then he is elected, no matter who gets all the rest. But suppose Fillmore gets the two slave states of Maryland and Kentucky; then Buchanan is not elected; Fillmore
goes into the House of Representatives, and may be made President by a compromise. But suppose again Fillmore’s friends throw away a few thousand votes on him, in Indiana and Illinois, it will inevitably give these states to Buchanan, which will more than compensate him for the loss of Maryland and Kentucky; will elect him, and leave Fillmore no chance in the H.R. or out of it.” He concluded his incongruous appeal: “This is as plain as the adding up of the weights of three small hogs.” The Register got hold of a copy of the letter and ridiculed the supposedly “confidential” document. “We pity Mr. Lincoln,” the paper wrote, “for verily his abolition taskmasters are requiring dirty work at his hands.” Lincoln was undeterred and kept sending the same “confidential” letter to dozens of Fillmore supporters almost to Election Day.
The diehard Whigs maintained a rump party apart from the Know Nothings, mounted a statewide ticket, and published a campaign newspaper called The Conservative, which repeatedly savaged Lincoln. “Shortly after his return from the Bloomington Convention, we heard him,” the paper editorialized in a tone of mock sorrow. “We were not only surprised but sorry. . . . Surprised that a man of his acknowledged ability would indulge so thin and bold a piece of sophistry and sorry that a man, of his dignity of character, would descend to such pettifogging demogogueism. . . . These thoughts and feelings we shared in common, with all Mr. Lincoln’s old and long tried friends, those who stood by him in the days of his early struggle; those who had ‘breathed into him the political breath of life,’ those who had delighted at all times and everywhere to do him honor.” But now they excommunicated him. Lincoln looked for friends elsewhere.
All the Powers of Earth Page 33
