The Germans were more than another stumbling block to the Lincoln-Berdan plan. They were a rising group that could swing Illinois to the Republicans—decisive in numbers, well-educated, and committed to the antislavery cause. The 1856 campaign marked the beginning of Lincoln’s extensive relationship with German Americans and the exiled revolutionary Forty-Eighters, who became some of his most important allies, friends, and closest confidants, including his private secretary John Nicolay (who met him at the Bloomington convention), the future governor Gustave Koerner, and Carl Schurz, the journalist, soldier, and politician. Schurz first encountered Lincoln during his 1858 campaign for the Senate. “I had seen, in Washington and in the West, several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln’s,” Schurz recalled. “When, in a tone of perfect ingenuousness, he asked me—a young beginner in politics—what I thought about this and that, I should have felt myself very much honored by his confidence, had he permitted me to regard him as a great man. But he talked in so simple and familiar a strain, and his manner and homely phrase were so absolutely free from any semblance of self-consciousness or pretension to superiority, that I soon felt as if I had known him all my life and we had long been close friends.”
Alongside Lincoln, the state party convention at Bloomington had designated one other delegate at large to head its slate of presidential electors: Friedrich Hecker, “perhaps the most influential German in America,” according to the Chicago Democratic Press. In 1848 he had led an uprising for democracy in Baden crushed by Prussian troops in which the youthful Friedrich Engels served as a soldier in his army and Carl Schurz had been a supporter. Karl Marx criticized Hecker for prematurely attempting to overthrow the old regime. Gustave Koerner, a leader of the Illinois Germans, who was present at the convention, called Hecker “a great orator,” with a “profound and comprehensive knowledge of jurisprudence and of history,” and “a man of genius,” but given to emotional outbursts. Having once trained his artillery against German authoritarian rule, Hecker’s polemics now were directed against Stephen A. Douglas, whom he derided as “Master Douglas.”
After the Bloomington convention passed its plank against nativism, Hecker urged Germans, with the “history of two continents” guiding them, to join the party, which he said stood for the “principles of all true republicans of all times.” “Every German man who loves freedom is inclined to recognize Hecker as his leader and serve under him, certainly never against him,” declared the Iowa Staats-Zeitung. Hecker launched on a speaking tour, but had to suspend it when his house burned down, possibly an act of arson. “I am solidly convinced that the fire was set,” he wrote. “Kansas seems to have moved eastwards.” “The smoking ruin of this house should be a lasting sign of what they can expect from the party of slaveholders to all German citizens,” wrote the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, the newspaper edited by George Schneider, an ally of Lincoln. Lincoln raised funds for Hecker to rebuild his house. “We cannot dispense with your services in this contest,” he wrote him on September 14, “and we ought, in a peculiar way, to give you some relief in the difficulty of having your house burnt.” With Lincoln’s help, Hecker resumed his campaign speeches.
Lincoln launched himself on to the campaign trail, delivering about fifty speeches, mostly in towns in southern and central Illinois, determined to the end to try to win over the Old Whigs. He often found himself facing hostile crowds. At Petersburg, outside Springfield, Henry B. Rankin, Lincoln’s law clerk, observed Lincoln being escorted by a “corporal’s guard” under a large banner bearing Frémont’s profile, to the courthouse steps.
Around the platform, louder and louder, arose hurrahs for Buchanan and for Fillmore. No voice for Fremont rang out through the crisp air to cheer the coming orator. Lincoln could hardly have had less political sympathy that day if he had entered Charleston or Richmond for that purpose. . . . Rude fellows of the rowdy sort had boasted, “No d—d abolition speeches could be made in Menard County this campaign.” Had any other Republican than Lincoln stood before those Menard people, he would not have been heard. Several rushes toward the colours and banners were made, with the evident purpose of tearing them down. Cat-calls, whistles, and tin horns added to the din. Shouts of “Abolitionist,” “Nigger equality,” with snatches of obscene ballads and campaign songs, made a bedlam of the court-house yard and the surrounding public square. At intervals, and shrill above all such sounds, came the conflicting huzzahs for Buchanan and equally loud shouts for Fillmore. No slogans for the Republican standard-bearer, Fremont, came from the excited crowd of voters.
Lincoln stood silent for a half hour until there was a lull for him to speak. “And here,” reported the Register, “quietly vanished away the post mortem candidate for the vice presidency of the abolition political cock-boat, the depot master of the underground railroad, the great Abram Lincoln. He left no traces of his appearance, and has now ‘gone to be seen no more,’ leaving behind him, in Menard [County], half a dozen poor souls, to mourn the political death-knell of John C. Fremont in next November.”
Noah Brooks, a young journalist working for the Republican cause, who would later become a Lincoln confidant, met him at a rally in Dixon in northern Illinois. “As he reasoned with his audience,” Brooks recalled, “he bent his long form over the railing of the platform, stooping lower and lower as he pursued his argument, until, having reached his point, he clinched it (usually with a question), and then suddenly sprang upright, reminding one of the springing open of a jack-knife blade.”
After Lincoln spoke he and Brooks discussed the Republicans’ prospects that year. “We crawled under the pendulous branches of a tree, and Lincoln, lying flat on the ground, with his chin in his hands, talked on, rather gloomily as to the present, but absolutely confident as to the future. I was dismayed to find that he did not believe it possible that Fremont could be elected. As if half pitying my youthful ignorance, but admiring my enthusiasm, he said: ‘Don’t be discouraged if we don’t carry the day this year. We can’t do it, that’s certain. We can’t carry Pennsylvania; those old Whigs down there are too strong for us. But we shall, sooner or later, elect our president. I feel confident of that.’ ”
“Do you think we shall elect a Free-soil president in 1860?” Brooks asked. “Well, I don’t know,” Lincoln replied. “Everything depends on the course of the Democracy. There’s a big anti-slavery element in the Democratic party, and if we could get hold of that, we might possibly elect our man in 1860. But it’s doubtful—very doubtful. Perhaps we shall be able to fetch it by 1864; perhaps not. As I said before, the Free-soil party is bound to win, in the long run. It may not be in my day; but it will in years, I do really believe.”
After turning down requests for him to speak in Iowa and New York, Lincoln accepted an invitation to speak at Kalamazoo, Michigan, on August 27, where he addressed a mass rally of ten thousand people, the only time he left Illinois that year. His speech was a fervent defense of free labor over slavery, but more daringly an open defense of abolitionists as Republicans. “The question of slavery, at the present day, should be not only the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question. . . . There could be no middle way.” Slavery, Lincoln explained, had enormous economic power that translated into political power. “Slavery is looked upon by men in the light of dollars and cents. The estimated worth of the slaves at the South is $1,000,000,000, and in a very few years, if the institution shall be admitted into the territories, they will have increased fifty per cent in value. . . . Slavery is to be made a ruling element in our government.” He explained the insidious influence by which slavery would establish itself in the territories. “We will suppose that there are ten men who go into Kansas to settle. Nine of these are opposed to slavery. One has ten slaves. The slaveholder is a good man in other respects; he is a good neighbor, and being a wealthy man, he is enabled to do the others many neighborly kindnesses. They like the man, though they don’t like the syste
m by which he holds his fellow-men in bondage. And here let me say, that in intellectual and physical structure, our Southern brethren do not differ from us. They are, like us, subject to passions, and it is only their odious institution of slavery, that makes the breach between us. These ten men of whom I was speaking, live together three or four years; they intermarry; their family ties are strengthened. And who wonders that in time, the people learn to look upon slavery with complacency? This is the way in which slavery is planted, and gains so firm a foothold.”
Lincoln took issue with the leading theoretical argument propounded by a Southern ideologue against the very ideas of democracy and equality. They were made in a book by George Fitzhugh, the chief editorial writer for the Richmond Enquirer, Sociology for the South, or The Failure of Free Society, that “aroused the ire of Lincoln more than most pro-slavery books, according to Herndon. “Men are not born entitled to ‘equal rights!’ ” wrote Fitzhugh, dismissing the Declaration of Independence. “I have noticed in Southern newspapers, particularly the Richmond Enquirer, the Southern view of the Free States,” said Lincoln. “They insist that slavery has a right to spread. They defend it upon principle. They insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern laborers! They think that men are always to remain laborers here—but there is no such class. The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him. These men don’t understand when they think in this manner of Northern free labor. When these reasons can be introduced, tell me not that we have no interest in keeping the Territories free for the settlement of free laborers.”
Then Lincoln grabbed the sharp end of the knife wielded against the Republicans. The cutting tactic that both Democrats and Know Nothings used to divide Republicans, throw them on the defensive and drive Old Whigs away was to raise the visibility of abolitionists within their ranks. Now Lincoln embraced the abolitionists as fellow party men and put the challenge to the Democrats. “They tell us that we are in company with men who have long been known as abolitionists,” he said. “What care we how many may feel disposed to labor for our cause? Why do not you, Buchanan men, come in and use your influence to make our party respectable?” A newspaper account recorded the audience reaction: “(Laughter.)” Lincoln had crossed a Rubicon. And he would appear on platforms in Illinois with Lovejoy.
Douglas, too, was out on the campaign trail. He spoke at a Springfield rally of thousands on September 18. “Shout after shout followed the homethrusts and happy hits he made at the abolition enemy,” reported the Register. “He tore off their hypocritical mask, and exposed to his hearers the corruption of the tricksters who trade in negro sympathy and Kansas roorbacks.” Theodore Parker, traveling in the state, happened to see Douglas speak at Galesburg in late October. “He was considerably drunk, and made one of the most sophisticated and deceitful speeches I ever listened to,” he wrote Senator John P. Hale. “It was mere brutality in respect of morals, and sophistry for logic, in the style and manner of a low blackguard. His enemies said he seldom or never did so ill. But there is a good deal of rough power in his evil face. I never saw him before.”
The results of the Electoral College vote in which Buchanan won 174 votes, Frémont 114, and Fillmore 8 did not capture the underlying weakness of the Democratic Party, the potential for the Republicans, and doom of the Know Nothings. Buchanan was elected to face the coming crisis with a fragile mandate. Not just one of the candidates was “sectional.” The country itself was in the process of polarizing along sectional lines. As a presidential party, the Democrats faltered across the upper North, from New England to New York to Ohio to Iowa, which Frémont swept. Buchanan was the first candidate since the parties were formally organized to win only by a plurality, not a majority. He barely won five free states. He was dependent on a solid South, where Frémont was kept off the ballot. In three border states where voters were allowed to vote for Frémont, the Republican won 514 in Kentucky, 281 in Maryland, and 291 in Virginia. In Buchanan’s home state of Pennsylvania, his majority was only 627 votes against his two challengers. His worst winning state was Illinois, where he lost the popular vote to the two opposing parties by 28,278 votes. It was obvious that if a marginal number of Know Nothings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and California voted for the Republican candidate in 1860, whoever he might be, he would likely to be elected. The Republicans’ hope directed them strategically to the lower North.
Fillmore, who had railed against the sectionalism of the Republican Party, turned out to be a purely sectional candidate. He won 48 percent of the vote of the border South, 43 percent of the middle South, 41 percent of the lower South, but only 11 percent in the North. The only state he won outright was Maryland. He was the last gasp of the remnant of Southern Whigs, most on their way to realigning as Democrats. His loss was fatal to the Know Nothings. His failure to displace the debate over slavery with nativism removed the rationale for a nativist party.
The essence of Fillmore’s candidacy was yearning for a return to the status quo ante—the time when Fillmore was president and had supposedly settled the question of slavery. It was a reactionary sentiment clothed as moderation. After the 1856 election, Fillmoreism would morph into another third party, the Constitutional Union Party, created by many of the same key political operatives who were behind Fillmore’s American Party and whose presidential candidate in 1860, John Bell, a former senator from Tennessee, had endorsed Fillmore. Fillmore’s legacy was further embodied in the pro-slavery compromises advanced during the secession crisis by Senator John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, Fillmore’s attorney general, a Know Nothing, who had campaigned for Fillmore. Fillmoreism, if there were such a thing, also evolved into Kentucky’s determination during the war to remain within the Union as a slave state, exemplified by prominent former Know Nothings, such as George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, who opposed emancipation with a vehemence he had previously reserved for immigrants. Fillmore in 1856 was an evanescent figure, but his candidacy was the beginning of a complex political conundrum that would plague Lincoln until he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and by that act, end it.
The fire-eating Charleston Mercury saw the handwriting on the wall in Buchanan’s precarious victory, “elected because the enemies of the south could not agree among themselves.” The Richmond Enquirer, however, editorialized that the result “is another striking evidence of the growing popularity of negro slavery, to show that negro slavery and the Union must stand or fall together, and that in talking of disunion, in event of Fremont’s election, we were but pointing out its inevitable consequence and administering salutary warning.”
The 1856 results predicted a future in which Illinois would be the Democrats’ weakest link and the Republicans’ greatest opportunity. In eight southern Illinois counties Frémont’s totals were like those in border states. He received only 50 votes, “cast by preachers, teachers, and eastern people,” according to John Moses, a Republican activist, delegate to the Bloomington convention, and later an Illinois historian. Frémont’s vote in central Illinois was also not strong. In Springfield, Buchanan carried 912 votes, Frémont 549, and Fillmore 403. Frémont did worse in Sangamon County as a whole. Yet the Republican ticket won every statewide office and Bissell was elected governor with Know Nothing votes. But the Republican victory on the state level also proved the explosive potential of the northern part of the state and the German vote. If Frémont had received the same percentage of votes as Bissell, just a slight marginal improvement, he would have won Illinois.
After the election, the Republicans of Illinois were in a buoyant mood. The first time their party was in the field it had gained power in a state that previously had voted for a Democrat for governor with only one exception since it was admitted to the Union. On December 10, Republicans held a celebratory banquet at the Tremont House in Chicago, a palatial hotel, to be addressed by Lin
coln. He was already looking to the Senate race in two years against Douglas. On the stump, Lincoln had made it a point to be introduced as the next Senator from Illinois. His keynote was the beginning of another campaign.
“Our government rests in public opinion,” Lincoln said. “Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.” Public opinion, according to Lincoln, was not an immutable god, but itself changeable, subject to political effect, and once transformed would create a new direction in the government. The proof was in the Republican victories in Illinois and the emergence of a Republican North. Lincoln had begun the campaign uncertain whether the new party would be able to cohere at all. He had wandered from car to car on the train to the Bloomington convention in search of Old Whigs from southern Illinois. Six months later, the rigors of the campaign brought together more than a new coalition, but also forged a new political identity. In Illinois, it required the finesse of Lincoln, Fell, and Lovejoy to thwart the lure of the Old Whigs’ resentment and avoid the beatific martyrdom of radical posturing. Frémont served his larger purpose as an icon, despite having nothing memorable to say. The attack on his origins was an attempt to abort the birth of the Republican Party. Exploitation of his vulnerabilities projected fear of Republican strengths. His limitations as a politician were not decisive to the final outcome in any case and suggested the void to be filled next time. The passive Frémont had succeeded through his defeat. It was not an ordinary campaign. Unlike the Whig campaigns of the past, it was fought around a set of clearly defined issues and principles. Now representing the public opinion of the North, the Republicans had built their party on a solid foundation.
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