Lincoln wrote out the words of his answer: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.
“I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. . . . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new. Do you doubt it?”
Lincoln filed this fragment of writing away in a drawer. Herndon, who “pondered a good deal over Lincoln’s dejection,” came up with a plan. He decided that he would undertake a fact-finding tour of the East, meet with the great men with whom he had corresponded but never encountered face-to-face, and for the first time see the marble federal buildings of Washington, walk the crowded streets of New York, and climb Beacon Hill in Boston. At Washington, Lincoln’s scout met with Trumbull, who confided that while Douglas had no intention of switching parties there was among some Republicans “a DISPOSITION to sell out Illinois” by backing Douglas for the Senate. Herndon was alarmed, “astonished . . . and thunder stuck.” Meeting with Senators Seward and Wilson, Herndon confirmed what Trumbull had told him about the drift toward Douglas. But Seward also said that Republicans would never support “so slippery a man as Douglas.”
Herndon proceeded to see Douglas himself, who was ill but nonetheless seemed pleased to usher him into his Washington home and give him a cigar. “He is not in anybody’s way, not even in yours, Judge Douglas,” Herndon assured him about Lincoln. And Douglas returned the sentiment by saying he was not in Lincoln’s way. “Give Mr. Lincoln my regards,” he said, “when you return, and tell him I have crossed the river and burned my boat.” What did he mean by that cryptic remark? Not that he would abandon his party, but that he would not reverse his course against the Buchanan administration on Lecompton.
In New York, Greeley granted Herndon a twenty-minute audience during which he lectured him on the greatness of Douglas. Apparently, he did not know that his visitor was Lincoln’s law partner. “He talked bitterly—somewhat so—against the papers in Illinois, and said they were fools,” Herndon reported in a letter to Lincoln on March 24. “I asked him this question ‘Greeley, do you want to see a third party organized, or do you want Douglas to ride to power through the North, which he has so much abused and betrayed?’ and to which he replied, ‘Let the future alone; it will all come right. Douglas is a brave man. Forget the past and sustain the righteous.’ Good God, righteous, eh!”
In Boston, Herndon met at the State House with Governor Nathaniel Banks, who assumed the bearded rustic from the hinterlands would naturally support the conventional wisdom of Eastern political circles. “He asked me this question ‘You will sustain Douglas in Illinois won’t you?’ and to which I said ‘No, never!’ ” Herndon wrote Lincoln that Banks “affected to be much surprised” at his answer. Herndon added, “The northern men are cold to me—somewhat repellent.”
On his Boston sojourn, Herndon dropped in on his constant correspondent and revered hero, Theodore Parker, who cut him short when Herndon began babbling about philosophy. But Herndon’s admiration was undimmed, their correspondence continued unabated, and upon his return to Springfield, after a side trip to see the wonder of Niagara Falls, he brought a copy of Parker’s collected sermons and lectures for Lincoln, which included “The Effect of Slavery on the American People.” According to Herndon, Lincoln “liked especially the following expression, which he marked with a pencil: ‘Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.’ ”
Back in Springfield, Herndon briefed the Illinois Republican leaders on the Eastern collaboration with Douglas and scheme to dump Lincoln. He told a tale never substantiated of a secret meeting Douglas held in the late fall of 1857 in Chicago, after he decided to oppose the Lecompton Constitution, with Greeley, Seward, and Thurlow Weed. “Illinois,” Herndon wrote Elihu Washburne on April 10, “was to be chaffered for, and huckstered off without our consent, and against our will. . . . Illinois is not for sale. We here are not willing to be sacrificed for a fiction—national maneuvers.” On April 19, “Long John” Wentworth, the mayor of Chicago, who also harbored his own not so secret ambition for the Senate, wrote Lincoln, “I fear, Lincoln, that you are sold for the Senate by men who are drinking the wine of Douglas at Washington.”
“We want to be our own masters,” Herndon wrote Greeley on May 7, “and if any politician wants our respect, confidence, or support now or hereafter, let him stand aloof and let us alone.” “Friend Herndon,” Greeley replied on May 29, “I have not proposed to instruct the Republicans of Illinois in their political duties, and I doubt very much that even so much as is implied in your letter can be fairly deduced from anything I have written.” Then he made “one prediction,” that Douglas’s close associate, Congressman Thomas Harris, “will beat you badly.” Greeley signed off, “Now paddle your own dugout.” (Harris, however, suffering from consumption, died in November.)
There were some defections of local Republicans in Illinois to Douglas, gestures of support for his reelection to the Senate, but these only stoked the rising anger of state party leaders against the arrogance and condescension of the Eastern Republicans. “Are our friends crazy?” wrote Jesse Dubois to Trumbull on April 8. Greeley wrote an angry letter to Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, “You have repelled Douglas, who might have been conciliated and attached to our side. . . . You know what was the almost unanimous desire of the Republicans of other states; and you spurned and insulted them. Now go ahead and fight it through. You are in for it.” “There seems to be a considerable notion pervading the brains of political wet-nurses at the East, that the barbarians of Illinois cannot take care of themselves,” editorialized the Tribune in reply.
Lincoln monitored the situation closely, writing Washburne on April 26 that an informant had told him of a rumor, that a Republican congressman sent private letters of support on behalf of Douglas, identifying Washburne as the turncoat, and that a number of Chicago Republicans had also communicated to Lincoln as well that Washburne was the culprit, but that Lincoln believed no such thing. “I am satisfied you have done no wrong,” he wrote. If Washburne was promoting Douglas, there was no more evidence of the effort from him or another mysterious congressman. On May 27, Lincoln wrote Washburne again, reporting that Herndon had gotten information from Medill, expressing “great alarm at the prospect of North Republicans going over to Douglas.” Lincoln, however, couldn’t assess exactly what Douglas was calculating. “There certainly is a double game being played some how,” he wrote. But he added, “Unless he plays his double game more successfully than we have often seen done, he cannot carry many Republicans North, without at the same time losing a larger number of his old friends South.”
Another of Lincoln’s regular informants was Charles L. Wilson, editor of the Chicago Journal, who on May 31 sent him a clipping of an article reporting that some supporters of Seward were backing Douglas. In reply, on June 1, Lincoln evaluated the motives and actions of the Eastern Republicans: “I have believed—I do believe now—that Greeley, for instance, would be rather pleased to see Douglas reflected over me or any other Republican; and yet I do not believe it is so because of any secret arrangement with Douglas. It is because he thinks Douglas’s superior position, reputation, experience, ability, if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure Republican position, and therefore his reflection do the general cause of Republicanism more good than would the election of any one of our better undistinguished pure Republicans. . . . He denies that he directly is taking part in favor of Douglas, and I believe him. Still his feeling constantly manifests itself in his paper, which, being so extensively read in Illinois, is, and will continue to be, a drag upon us. I have also thought that Governor Seward, too, fee
ls about as Greeley does.”
Lincoln did more than gather political intelligence. He had always favored party conventions since he had tried to win his first nomination for the Congress in 1843. Now he devised a plan to use the crucible of party politics as an instrument of innovation. Senators, of course, were chosen by state legislatures, and campaigns, such as they were, were conducted behind the scenes and within its chambers after popular election of its members. Douglas’s shape-shifting after coming out against the Lecompton Constitution, the cavalier interference of Eastern Republicans, and the reaction against them from Illinois Republicans prompted Lincoln to set in motion a daring new process—a public campaign for senator before the state legislature was elected. The effect would be to turn the legislature into a sort of Electoral College, ratifying the voters’ choice.
“My judgment is that we must never sell old friends to buy old enemies,” Lincoln wrote one of his most loyal political allies, the Illinois secretary of state, Ozias M. Hatch, on March 24. “Let us have a State convention, in which we can have a full consultation: and till which, let us all stand firm, making no committals, as to strange and new combinations.” Soon, meeting in Chicago, the state Republican Party central committee ratified Lincoln’s idea and fixed the event for June 16 in Springfield. Nearly every one of the state’s one hundred counties held conventions proclaiming support for Lincoln and electing delegates. Herndon raced from county to county, convention to convention. (Among those helping behind the scenes was Hatch’s young elections clerk, a former newspaper editor, John Nicolay, who would become Lincoln’s assistant in the White House.)
Douglas staged a convention of his own in Springfield on April 21, establishing his control over his state party in an internecine battle with Buchanan loyalists, but also signaling he would not switch parties. Thirty Republicans leaders from the far corners of the state met immediately afterward in Springfield to affirm their support for Lincoln. “A word about the conventions,” Lincoln wrote Washburne on April 26. “The democracy parted in not a very encouraged state of mind. On the contrary, our friends, a good many of whom were present, parted in high spirits. They think if we do not triumph the fault will be our own, and so I really think.”
The factional divisions between Old Whigs and abolitionists that had plagued the Republican Party since its creation two years earlier, however, suddenly flared again. Judge David Davis was never reconciled to the election of Owen Lovejoy to the Congress. He and his coterie on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Lincoln’s inner circle, plotted against Lovejoy. Their justification was that Lovejoy would alienate Old Whig voters in the central part of the state and cost Lincoln the election. Yet if they succeeded in ousting Lovejoy they might cost Lincoln the election by alienating voters in the northern part. Lincoln, learning of his friends’ plans, confidentially warned Lovejoy. “I have just returned from court in one of the counties of your District, where I had an inside view that few will have who correspond with you; and I feel it rather a duty to say a word to you about it,” he wrote on March 8. “Your danger has been that democracy would wheedle some republican to run against you without a nomination, relying mainly on democratic votes. I have seen the strong men who could make the most trouble in that way, and find that they view the thing in the proper light, and will not consent to be so used. But they have been urgently tempted by the enemy; and I think it is still the point for you to guard most vigilantly. I think it is not expected that you can be beaten for a nomination; but do not let what I say, as to that, lull you.” He added a request for secrecy. “Now, let this be strictly confidential; not that there is anything wrong in it; but that I have some highly valued friends who would not like me any the better for writing it.”
In May, Lyle Dickey’s son-in-law, W.H.L. Wallace, announced he would run against Lovejoy. He believed that he could win enough county conventions to topple the incumbent. Judge Davis decided that he should explore the possibility of becoming a candidate against Lovejoy himself. He dispatched Ward Hill Lamon, one of Lincoln’s closest friends, to Champaign County to survey the political ground. Old Whigs encouraged Davis to run. But word leaked out. The Chicago Tribune lambasted his stealth campaign. “Judge Davis . . . has no more sympathy with the vitalizing principle of the Republican party than an Egyptian mummy. He was among the bolters in ’56 and refused to vote for Lovejoy.” Davis’s hopes quickly died when the McLean County Republican convention, his own county, rejected him for Lovejoy. “I believe the whole country is fast going to the Devil,” Lamon wailed to Lincoln. “Judge Davis is, of course, out of the field.” Lincoln replied to Lamon on June 11 that his view “remains unchanged that running an independent candidate against Lovejoy, will not do—that it will result in nothing but disaster all round.” He explained that the anti-Lovejoy gesture would only backfire. “In the first place whoever so runs will be beaten, and will be spotted for life; in the second place, while the race is in progress, he will be under the strongest temptation to trade with the democrats, and to favor the election of certain of their friends to the Legislature; thirdly, I shall be held responsible for it, and Republican members of the Legislature, who are partial to Lovejoy, will, for that, oppose me; and lastly it will in the end lose us the District altogether.” He urged Lamon and the others to support Lovejoy. To ameliorate the damage to Davis, Lincoln wrote an anonymous article for the Chicago Tribune under the pseudonym of “A Republican,” who was identified as his friend “for many years.” “I am certain that no plot or movement against Lovejoy’s re-nomination was led on by him, or that he was cognizant of anything of the kind. . . . I believe he did not vote for Lovejoy in 1856. . . . As to the approaching canvas, Judge Davis expects Lovejoy to be nominated, and intends to vote for him, and has so stated without hesitation or reserve.” Lincoln quoted Davis, “the substance if not the exact words”: “ ‘No, gentlemen,’ said the Judge, ‘I will not lend my sanction to any such movement. If Mr. L. is nominated it is the duty of all good republicans to give him their support.’ ” On June 7, Davis wrote W.H.L. Wallace on “our failure.” “The Abolition element is successful here and very proscriptive. They are entirely in the ascendency. . . . Is there any hope? . . . If it were not for saving Lincoln for United States Senate a pretty great outbreak would follow. I don’t believe Lovejoy can be beaten if nominated and there is no use of bolting.”
Lincoln began work on his acceptance speech for the convention, scratching out fragments and phrases on scraps of paper and the back of envelopes, stuffing some of them into his stovetop hat for safekeeping. Spreading his notes on his desk, he carefully composed his text. When Jesse Dubois dropped in the office and asked Lincoln what he was doing, he was shooed away. “I’ll not let you see it now,” Lincoln said. He wanted more than to preserve his unbroken concentration. Dubois was among Lincoln’s more conservative friends and Lincoln did not want to hear a preemptive negative comment. In early June, he called Herndon into his office, locked the door and drew the curtain over the glass window. Then he read his speech, stopping at the end of his first paragraph, waiting for the reaction.
This is the paragraph Lincoln read to him: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
“It is true, but is it wise or politic to say so?” Herndon replied. Lincoln knew his partner’s political leanings and that he was likely to approve. Indeed, on June 1, H
erndon had written Parker, “I will do all I can to hold the leader’s hands up.” But upon hearing Lincoln say, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Herndon hesitated and wondered aloud whether Lincoln was being prudent. Selected as Lincoln’s audience of one for this rehearsal, he should have known that Lincoln was determined to utter that phrase. Herndon knew that was not the first time Lincoln had inserted it into a speech. Lincoln had first used the biblical injunction of “a house divided” fifteen years earlier, in 1843, in a Whig circular, warning against party disunity. Lincoln had tried the phrase “half slave and half free” on the conservative Old Whig Judge T. Lyle Dickey in 1854, shortly after Douglas introduced his Kansas-Nebraska Act, early one morning, when they shared a bedroom on the court circuit. “Oh, Lincoln,” Dickey admonished, “go to sleep.” He had written the Kentucky judge, George Robertson, on August 15, 1855, “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?” He had used the line “a house divided, half slave, half free,” in his rousing Bloomington convention speech, according to Dickey, who was present.
Now Lincoln told Herndon he would not be stopped from using the provocative phrases. “That expression is a truth of all human experience, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand,’ and ‘he that runs may read,’ ” he said. “The proposition also is true, and has been for six thousand years. I want to use some universally known figure expressed in simple language as universally well-known, that may strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times. I do not believe I would be right in changing or omitting it. I would rather be defeated with this expression in the speech, and uphold and discuss it before the people, than be victorious without it.”
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