All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Lincoln’s friends were embittered and fed his gloom. Davis wrote him on November 7 a letter filled with rage against Dickey’s act of subversion: “The Pharisaical old Whigs in the Central counties, who are so much more righteous than other people, I can’t talk about with any patience—The lever of Judge Dickeys influence has been felt—He drew the letter out of Mr. Crittenden & I think, in view of everything, that it was perfectly outrageous in Mr Crittenden to have written anything—Some of you may forgive him, & Gov Seward & Mr. Greeley but I cannot—It was very shameful in my opinion for Dickey, to have kept that letter from 1st Augt & then published it a week before the election—This portion of the state has been almost the only part doing well.”

  Lincoln’s greatest chance had dissolved into another defeat. He offered his own analysis of the election results to his old friend and doctor Anson G. Henry. “As a general rule, out of Sangamon, as well as in it, much of the plain old democracy is with us, while nearly all the old exclusive silk-stocking whiggery is against us. I do not mean nearly all the old whig party; but nearly all of the nice exclusive sort. And why not? There has been nothing in politics since the Revolution so congenial to their nature, as the present position of the great democratic party.”

  He felt no regret but was tinged with despair. “I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”

  Within a week, Lincoln was calculating vote numbers to project the future strength of the party. “But let the past as nothing be,” he wrote Norman Judd on November 15. “For the future my view is that the fight must go on. . . . We have some hundred and twenty thousand clear Republican votes. That pile is worth keeping together. It will elect a state trustee [treasurer?] two years hence. In that day I shall fight in the ranks, but I shall be in no one’s way for any of the places. I am especially for Trumbull’s reelection.”

  “The fight must go on,” he wrote on November 19 to Henry Asbury, a friend in Quincy, the law partner of Abraham Jonas. “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats. Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down, and to uphold the Slave interest. No ingenuity can keep those antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon come. Yours truly A. LINCOLN.”

  Lincoln may have said he had no political future, but he was laying the groundwork for one if it might come into view. On his own he moved forward to arrange the publication of the debates. “I wish to preserve a Set of the late debates (if they may be called so) between Douglas and myself,” he wrote Charles Ray of the Chicago Tribune. “To enable me to do so, please get two copies of each number of your paper containing the whole, and send them to me by Express; and I will pay you for the papers & for your trouble. I wish the two sets, in order to lay one away in the raw, and to put the other in a Scrap-book. Remember, if part of any debate is on both sides of one sheet, it will take two sets to make one scrap-book.”

  Lincoln tried to rouse Ray from his dejection. The melancholic Lincoln, seemingly defeated for his last time, was remarkably resilient. “I believe, according to a letter of yours to [Ozias] Hatch you are ‘feeling like h—ll yet.’ Quit that. You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again. Douglas managed to be supported both as the best instrument to put down and to uphold the slave power; but no ingenuity can long keep these antagonisms in harmony. Yours as ever A. LINCOLN.”

  Within a month, Lincoln had collected transcripts of the debates from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times in order to make an authoritative version. John Nicolay, the twenty-six-year-old German-born former editor of the Pike County Free Press and clerk for Secretary of State Ozias Hatch, was helping him as an assistant. By March 1859, he sent them out to publishers. By the fall, Lincoln signed a contract with Follett, Foster & Co., of Columbus, Ohio. The debates would not fade into memory.

  On January 6, the Illinois legislature convened to elect Douglas along a strict party line vote. Charles H. Lanphier, editor of the Register, telegraphed the victorious results to Douglas: “Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy, Douglas 54, Lincoln 41. Announcement followed by shouts of immense crowd present. Town wild with excitement. Democrats firing salute. . . . Guns, music and whisky rampant.” Back over the wires from Washington to Springfield flashed the laconic comment of the victor, “Let the voice of the people rule.”

  On the day of Douglas’s election, Henry Clay Whitney found Lincoln alone in his law office, “gloomy as midnight . . . brooding over his ill-fortune,” and reflecting that people “are always putting me in the place where somebody has to be beaten and sacrificed for the welfare of the party or the common good.”

  But a clerk in the Lincoln-Herndon law office, Charles S. Zane, recalled Lincoln in a different mood. “In January, 1859, while the Democrats were celebrating the election of Stephen A. Douglas to the United States Senate, Archibald Williams . . . came into Lincoln’s office and finding him writing said: ‘Well, the Democrats are making a great noise over their victory.’ Looking up, Lincoln replied: ‘Yes, Archie, Douglas has taken this trick, but the game is not played out.’ ”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE PHOENIX

  Four days before the election, after speaking to a large rally at Petersburg, twenty miles outside Springfield, Lincoln was driven to the station to catch a train home. There he found a young journalist, Henry Villard, who wrote for the German language newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. “The train that we intended to take for Springfield was about due,” Villard recalled.

  After vainly waiting for half an hour for its arrival, a thunderstorm compelled us to take refuge in an empty freight-car standing on a side track, there being no buildings of any sort at the station. We squatted down on the floor of the car and fell to talking on all sorts of subjects. It was then and there he told me that, when he was clerking in a country store, his highest political ambition was to be a member of the State Legislature. “Since then, of course,” he said laughingly, “I have grown some, but my friends got me into this business. I did not consider myself qualified for the United States Senate, and it took me a long time to persuade myself that I was. Now, to be sure,” he continued, with another of his peculiar laughs, “I am convinced that I am good enough for it; but, in spite of it all, I am saying to myself every day: It is too big a thing for you; you will never get it. Mary insists, however, that I am going to be Senator and President of the United States, too.” These last words he followed with a roar of laughter, with his arms around his knees, and shaking all over with mirth at his wife’s ambition. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “of such a sucker as me as President!”

  Lincoln, October 1858

  Mary Todd Lincoln never wavered in her faith that her husband should become president. She had proclaimed as a girl to Henry Clay that she would marry a president. She saw as no one else did the diamond in the rough that was Lincoln, marrying him against the wishes of her family, who dismissed him as socially unsuitable, a lowly “plebe.” The mingling of their ambitions was the foundation of “our Lincoln party,” as she called their enterprise long before there was a Republican Party. Her sharp differences with him in their politics and social attitudes—her nativism, harsh treatment of her Irish maids, disdain for her husband’s easy relationships with free blacks, her refusal to support Frémont’s candidacy in 1856—made not the slightest difference in her unstinting devotion to his rise and her resentment toward anyone who might impede it. She was equally intolerant of his underlying insecurities. “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest,” said Herndon. But when it slowed at the bottom of a hill, she provided the push. She had no patience for his undervaluing of himself. When he was elected to the state legislature i
n 1854, she insisted the position was beneath him and that he must immediately run for the Senate. She never forgave her friend, Julia, Lyman Trumbull’s wife, after Lincoln sacrificed his candidacy to elect Trumbull. (Even after Lincoln’s death, Mary wrote that Julia “would not be received—She is indeed ‘a whited Sepulchre.’ ”) Lincoln knew that any backtracking would meet Mary’s wrath.

  Trumbull, who was the beneficiary of Lincoln’s selfless calculation, his ally and yet held a residue of rivalry, tried to measure the ambiguities of Lincoln’s ambition for decades. Trumbull had known Lincoln since they served in the legislature together. “We were both opposed to the spread of slavery, and from the foundation of the Republican party till his death we were in political accord,” he wrote. “I do not claim to have been his confidant, and doubt if any man ever had his entire confidence. He was secretive, and communicated no more of his own thoughts and purposes than he thought would subserve the ends he had in view. He had the faculty of gaining the confidence of others by apparently giving them his own, and in that way attached to himself many friends. I saw much of him after we became political associates, and can truthfully say that he never misled me by word or deed. He was truthful, compassionate, and kind, but he was one of the shrewdest men I ever knew. To use a common expression he was ‘as cunning as a fox.’ He was a good judge of men, their motives, and purposes, and knew how to wield them to his own advantage.” But Trumbull thought that Lincoln was eerily passive in making his progress. “He was not aggressive. Ever ready to take advantage of the public current, he did not attempt to lead it.” On the other hand, Trumbull wrote, “Mr. Lincoln was by no means the unsophisticated, artless man many took him to be. . . . Another popular mistake is to suppose Mr. Lincoln free from ambition. A more ardent seeker after office never existed. From the time when, at the age of twenty-three, he announced himself a candidate for the legislature from Sangamon County, till his death, he was almost constantly either in office, or struggling to obtain one. Sometimes defeated and often successful, he never abandoned the desire for office till he had reached the presidency the second time.” Yet Trumbull could not help feel that Lincoln was “a follower.” “Without attempting to form or create public sentiment, he waited till he saw whither it tended, and then was astute to take advantage of it.” Trumbull remained fixed on the riddle of Lincoln’s paradoxical transparent and enigmatic character.

  To others who knew Lincoln, his acute sense of the possible in any particular moment was not about vacillating on the path of least resistance but mysteriously related to his prescience. David R. Locke, then the editor of the Bucyrus, Ohio, Journal, who first encountered Lincoln during the 1858 campaign, received his analysis on the outcome of the election before it occurred. “At the time, he said he should carry the State on the popular vote, but that Douglas would, nevertheless, be elected to the Senate, owing to the skillful manner in which the State had been districted in his interest. ‘You can’t overturn a pyramid, but you can undermine it; that’s what I have been trying to do.’ He undermined the pyramid that the astute Douglas had erected, most effectually. It toppled and fell very shortly afterward.”

  A year later, in 1859, Locke met Lincoln in Columbus, Ohio. “By this time his vision had penetrated the future, and he had got a glimmering of what was to come. In his soul he knew what he should have advocated, but he doubted if the people were ready for the great movement of a few years later. Hence his halting at all the half-way houses.

  “ ‘Slavery,’ said he, ‘is doomed, and that within a few years. Even Judge Douglas admits it to be an evil, and an evil can’t stand discussion. In discussing it we have taught a great many thousands of people to hate it who had never given it a thought before. What kills the skunk is the publicity it gives itself. What a skunk wants to do is to keep snug under the barn—in the day-time, when men are around with shot-guns.’ ”

  Two years later, in 1860, just days after his election to the presidency, Lincoln reminded Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune about the Freeport Doctrine in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. “He bent his head down to my ear and said in low tones, something like this: ‘Do you recollect the argument we had on the way up to Freeport two years ago over my question that I was going to ask Judge Douglas about the power of squatters to exclude slavery from territories?’ And I replied—that I recollected it very well. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘don’t you think I was right in putting that question to him?’ I said: ‘Yes Mr. Lincoln, you were, and we were both right. Douglas’ reply to that question undoubtedly hurt him badly for the Presidency but it re-elected him to the Senate at that time as I feared it would.’ Lincoln then gave me a broad smile and said—‘Now I have won the place that he was playing for.’ We both laughed and the matter was never again referred to.” But Lincoln at the time did not know that was the game he was playing for. Yet he intended to damage Douglas not only in the Senate campaign but also in his campaign to come for president. He was playing a long game against Douglas. He didn’t know it was for himself. But what he had done dawned on him.

  Two days after the election, on November 4, Jeriah Bonham, editor of the Illinois Gazette of Lacon, a town near Peoria, published an editorial entitled, “Abraham Lincoln for President in 1860.” Bonham was a Whig turned Republican who had known Lincoln since 1844 and spoke with him during the recent campaign about how to win over Old Whigs. Bonham’s editorial declared that Douglas’s election though losing the majority thwarted “the popular voice.” In 1860, Lincoln “should lead the hosts of freedom” against Douglas. “Who has earned the proud position as well as he?” Bonham recalled discussing his percipient article with “personally strong friends of Mr. Lincoln” in the county who “thought his time ‘was not yet,’ ” that he might be ready to run for governor in 1858, then the Senate once more, and perhaps “for the presidency, if ever, some ten to fourteen years ahead—either for 1868 or 1872.”

  On November 5, Horace White of the Chicago Press and Tribune wrote Lincoln a letter. “I don’t think it possible for you to feel more disappointed than I do, with this defeat, but your popular majority in the state will give us the privilege of naming our man on the national ticket in 1860—either President or Vice Pres’t. Then, let me assure you, Abe Lincoln will shall be an honored name before the American people. I am going to write an article for the Atlantic Monthly to further that object.” White signed it: “Your friend in distress.” He added, “I believe you have risen to a national reputation & position more rapidly than any other man who ever rose at all.”

  Jesse W. Fell, who had originated the notion to challenge Douglas to debate, was the first person to present a plan to Lincoln for a campaign for the presidency. Within Lincoln’s circle Fell was unusual as a successful businessman with broad social interests and political shrewdness who lacked envy or resentment and was a fount of constructive ideas. During the Senate campaign Fell was absent from Illinois, traveling on business in the East. Following Lincoln through the newspapers, which reprinted the debates, “an impression began to form, that by judicious efforts he could made the Republican candidate for presidency in 1860,” he recalled. Shortly after the election, at the end of December, when Lincoln was in Bloomington, attending Judge Davis’s court, “I espied the tall form of Mr. Lincoln emerging from the court-house door.” Fell brought him to his brother’s nearby law office and “in the calm twilight of the evening” told him, “Lincoln, I have been East,” and “everywhere I hear you talked about. . . . Being, as you know, an ardent Republican and your friend, I usually told them we had in Illinois two giants instead of one; that Douglas was the little one, as they all knew, but that you were the big one, which they didn’t all know.” He explained that he had built a national reputation as an antislavery advocate and “you can be made a formidable, if not a successful, candidate for the presidency.”

  “Oh, Fell,” Lincoln replied, “what’s the use of talking of me for the presidency, whilst we have such men as Seward, Chase and others, who are
so much better known to the people, and whose names are so intimately associated with the principles of the Republican party. Everybody knows them; nobody, scarcely, outside of Illinois, knows me.”

  Fell was hardly deterred by Lincoln’s reticence. “The men you allude to, occupying more prominent positions, have undoubtedly rendered a larger service in the Republican cause than you have,” he said, “but the truth is, they have rendered too much service to be available candidates. Placing it on the grounds of personal services, or merit, if you please, I concede at once the superiority of their claims. Personal services and merit, however, when incompatible with the public good, must be laid aside. Seward and Chase have both made long records on this slavery question, and have said some very radical things which, however just and true in themselves, and however much these men may challenge our admiration for their courage and devotion to unpopular truths, would seriously damage them in the contest, if nominated.”

  Fell had given thought to the kind of winning candidate the Republicans should field. “We must bear in mind, Lincoln, that we are yet in a minority; we are struggling against fearful odds for supremacy. We were defeated on this same issue in 1856, and will be again in 1860, unless we get a great many new votes from what may be called the old conservative parties. These will be repelled by the radical utterances and votes of such men as Seward and Chase. What the Republican party wants, to insure success, in 1860, is a man of popular origin, of acknowledged ability, committed against slavery aggressions, who has no record to defend and no radicalism of an offensive character to repel votes from parties hitherto adverse. Your discussion with Judge Douglas has demonstrated your ability and your devotion to freedom; you have no embarrassing record; you have sprung from the humble walks of life, sharing in its toils and trials; and if we can only get these facts sufficiently before the people, depend upon it, there is some chance for you.”