In Missouri, Bates concluded that "the wild extravagance and utter futility of his plan" proved that Brown was "a madman." He discussed the incident at length with his young friend Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, who had come to stay at Grape Hill for several days with his wife, Flora, his child, and two free black servants. "He tells me a good deal about "Old Brown,"" Bates wrote in his diary. "He was at his capture-and has his [dagger]."
For Chase, the situation presented particular problems. Though he publicly denounced Brown"s violation of law and order, his younger daughter, Nettie, later conceded that "for a household accustomed to revere as friends of the family such men as Sumner, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and Longfellow," it was impossible not to sympathize with "the truly good old man who was about to die for others." She and her friends built a small fort in the conservatory and "raised a flag on which was painted...defiantly "Freedom forever; slavery never."" When friends warned Chase that such open support of Brown could not be countenanced, he had to explain to his daughter that "a great wrong" could not be righted "in the way poor old John Brown had attempted to do." The little fort was dismantled.
At the time of Brown"s execution on December 2, 1859, Lincoln was back on the campaign trail, telling an audience in Leavenworth, Kansas, that "the attempt to identify the Republican party with the John Brown business was an electioneering dodge." He wisely sought the middle ground between the statements of radical Republicans, like Emerson, who believed that Brown"s execution would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross," and conservative Republicans, who denounced Brown for his demented, traitorous scheme. He acknowledged that Brown had displayed "great courage" and "rare unselfishness." Nonetheless, he concluded, "that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right."
WHEN HE RETURNED from his canva.s.sing, Lincoln focused on the approaching meeting of the Republican National Committee, to be held on December 21, 1859, at the Astor House in New York. Committee members from nearly all the free states were gathered to decide where the Republican Convention would be held. Supporters of Seward, Chase, and Bates argued in turn that the convention should be placed in New York, Ohio, or Missouri. Though Lincoln had not yet committed himself publicly to run for the nomination, he wrote to Norman Judd, a member of the selection committee, to press the claims of Illinois, to satisfy friends who "attach more consequence" to the location than either he or Judd had originally done.
Judd waited patiently as the claims of Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Harrisburg were put forth. When no agreement could be reached, he shrewdly suggested Chicago as "good neutral ground where everyone would have an even chance." Although Lincoln was known to most of the committee members at this point, none considered him a serious candidate for the presidency. Judd "carefully kept "Old Abe" out of sight," observed Henry Whitney, "and the delegates failed to see any personal bearing the place of meeting was to have on the nomination." The choice finally narrowed down to St. Louis and Chicago. Judd "promised that the members of the Convention and all outsiders of the Republican faith should have a hospitable reception," that sufficient accommodations would be provided "for feeding and lodging the large crowd," and that "a hall for deliberation should be furnished free." Ultimately, Chicago beat St. Louis by a single vote.
Once Chicago was selected, Judd, a railway lawyer, persuaded the railroad companies to provide "a cheap excursion rate from all parts of the State," so that lack of funds would not keep Lincoln supporters from attending the convention. Concealed from his rivals, Lincoln had taken an important step toward the nomination.
So confident were Seward"s friends about his chances that they had no problem with the Chicago selection. "I like the place & the tenor of the call," New York editor John Bigelow wrote Seward at the time. "I do not see how either could be bettered, nor how it is possible to take exception to it." But Charles Gibson, Bates"s friend and supporter, was not so sanguine; he recognized that it was a blow to the Bates candidacy. "Had the convention been held in St. Louis," Gibson later wrote, "Lincoln would not have been the nominee."
As Lincoln"s candidacy became a real prospect, he attended to the request made by Jesse Fell a year earlier for a short history of his life to be published and distributed. After warning Fell that "there is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me," Lincoln detailed, without a hint of self-pity, the facts of his early life, growing up in "a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods."
"If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest," Lincoln told Fell. "Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself." This simple sketch written in his own hand would be used later in Republican efforts to romanticize Lincoln"s humble beginnings.
LINCOLN"S HOPES for making himself better known outside the West received an immense boost when he received the invitation from Chase supporter James Briggs to speak as part of a lecture series in Brooklyn. The lecture was eventually scheduled for February 27, 1860. Chase, as we saw, had declined the opportunity to speak in the same series, despite word that its organizers were men seeking an alternative to Seward. Upon his arrival in New York, Lincoln sought out Henry Bowen, editor of the antislavery New York Independent, who had helped arrange the event. "His clothes were travel-stained and he looked tired and woe-begone," Bowen recalled. "In this first view of him, there came to me the disheartening and appalling thought of the great throng which I had been so instrumental in inducing to come." But Bowen"s initial impression of Lincoln softened after Lincoln admitted that the long journey had worn him out, and said, "if you have no objection I will lie down on your lounge here and you can tell me about the arrangements for Monday night."
At the Astor House, Lincoln met Mayson Brayman, a fellow lawyer who had lived in Springfield for some years before returning to his native New York. "Well, B. how have you fared since you left Illinois?" Lincoln asked. "I have made one hundred thousand dollars and lost all," Brayman ruefully replied; "how is it with you, Mr. Lincoln?"
"Oh, very well," Lincoln said. "I have the cottage at Springfield and about $8,000 in money. If they make me Vice-President with Seward, as some say they will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to $20,000, and that is as much as a man ought to want." Lincoln"s sights, however, were not trained on the vice presidency, and politics, not riches, were his object.
That February afternoon, Lincoln paid a visit to the studio of the photographer Mathew Brady on Broadway. When Brady was posing him, he urged Lincoln to hike up his shirt collar. Lincoln quipped that Brady wanted "to shorten [his] neck." The resulting three-quarter-length portrait shows the fifty-one-year-old Lincoln standing before a pillar, the fingers of his left hand spread over a book. Prominent cheekbones cast marked shadows across his clean-shaven face. The delicate long bow of his upper lip contrasts with the full lower lip, and the deep-set gaze is steady and melancholy. This photograph, circulated widely in engravings and lithographs in the Northeast, was the first arresting image many would see of Abraham Lincoln.
Nearly fifteen hundred people came to hear "this western man" speak in the great hall at Cooper Union. He had bought a new black suit for the occasion, but it was badly wrinkled from the trip. An observer noticed that "one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was disheveled and stuck out like rooster"s feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than his sleeves." Yet once he began to speak, people were captivated by his earnest and powerful delivery.
Lincoln had labored to craft his address for many weeks, extensively researching the att.i.tudes of the founding fathers toward slavery. He took as the text for his discourse a speech in which Senator Douglas had said of slavery: "Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now." Fully endorsing this statement, Lincoln examined the beliefs and actions of the founders, concluding that they had marked slavery "as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity."
In the preceding months, tensions between North and South had continued to escalate, with each section joining in a "hue and cry" against the other. The troubling scenario that Lincoln had observed nearly two decades earlier, during the battle over temperance, had come to pa.s.s. Denunciation was being met by denunciation, "crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema." To have expected either side to respond differently once the rhetoric had heated up, Lincoln warned during that earlier battle, "was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is G.o.d"s decree, and never can be reversed."
At Cooper Union, as he had done in his celebrated Peoria speech six years earlier, Lincoln attempted to cut through the rancor of the embattled factions by speaking directly to the Southern people. While his faith in Southern responsiveness had seriously dimmed by this time, he hoped the fear and animosity of slaveholders might be a.s.suaged if they understood that the Republicans desired only a return to the "old policy of the fathers," so "the peace of the old times" could once more be established. Denying charges of sectionalism, he said Republicans were the true conservatives, adhering "to the old and tried, against the new and untried."
Turning to his fellow Republicans, he entreated, "let us do nothing through pa.s.sion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can." Though the approach was moderate, Lincoln spoke with such pa.s.sion and certainty about the unifying principle of the Republican Party-never to allow slavery "to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States"-that even the most radical Republicans in the audience were captivated. When he came to the dramatic ending pledge-"LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT"-the audience erupted in thunderous applause.
After Lincoln spoke, several of the event organizers took the platform. Chase supporter James Briggs predicted that "one of three gentlemen will be our standard bearer"-William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, or "the gallant son of Kentucky, who was reared in Illinois, and whom you have heard tonight." Lincoln"s still-unannounced candidacy had taken an enormous step forward.
"When I came out of the hall," one member of the audience said, "my face glowing with an excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, "He"s the greatest man since St. Paul.""
Once the speech was reported in the papers, Lincoln was in demand across New England. He answered as many requests as possible, undertaking an exhausting tour of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, repeating and modifying the arguments of his Cooper Union address. He was forced to decline invitations from outside New England but hoped "to visit New-Jersey & Pa. before the fall elections."
Writing to Mary from Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where their son Robert was completing a preparatory year before entering Harvard College, Lincoln admitted that the Cooper Union speech, "being within my calculation before I started, went off pa.s.sably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print."
In Hartford, Connecticut, on March 5, Lincoln first met Gideon Welles, an editorial writer for the Hartford Evening Press who would become his secretary of the navy. Arriving by train in the afternoon, Lincoln had several hours to spare before his speech that evening. He walked up Asylum Street to the bookstore of Brown & Gross, where he encountered the fifty-eight-year-old Welles, a peculiar-looking man with a curly wig perched on his outsize head, and a flowing white beard. Welles had attended Norwich University and studied the law but then devoted himself to writing, leaving the legal profession at twenty-four to take charge of the Democratic Hartford Times. A strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, Welles had represented his town of Glas...o...b..ry in the state legislature for eight years. He remained a loyal Democrat until the mid-fifties, when he became troubled by his affiliation to "the party of the Southern slaveocracy." Like many antislavery Democrats, he joined the Republican Party, though he still held fast to the frugal fiscal policies of the Democrats.
With the convention only two months away, Welles had settled on Chase, whom he had met four years earlier while visiting Cincinnati. While Welles held less radical views on slavery, he was comforted by Chase"s similar sentiments regarding government spending and states" rights. Seward, by contrast, frightened Welles. For years, the former Whig and the former Democrat had been at loggerheads over government spending; Welles was convinced that Seward belonged "to the New York school of very expensive rulers." Moreover, Welles was appalled by Seward"s talk of a "higher law" than the Const.i.tution and his predictions of an "irrepressible conflict." He was ready to support any candidate but Seward, despite the fact that Seward was the most popular among the Republicans.
That afternoon, Lincoln and Welles spent several hours conversing on a bench in the front of the store. Welles had read accounts of Lincoln"s debates with Douglas and had noted the extravagant reviews of his Cooper Union speech. There is no record of their conversation that day, but the prairie lawyer left a strong imprint on Welles, who watched that evening as he delivered a two-hour speech before an overflowing crowd at City Hall.
Though he retained much of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln developed a new metaphor in Hartford to perfectly ill.u.s.trate his distinction between accepting slavery where it already existed while doing everything possible to curtail its spread. Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in subsequent speeches. "If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road," Lincoln began, "any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them.... But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!...The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not."
The snake metaphor acknowledged the const.i.tutional protection of slavery where it legally existed, while harnessing the protective instincts of parents to safeguard future generations from the venomous expansion of slavery. This homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln"s ability to speak "as if the people were listening to their own thinking out loud." When Seward reached for a metaphor to dramatize the same danger, he warned that if slavery were allowed into Kansas, his countrymen would have "introduced the Trojan horse" into the new territory. Even if most of his cla.s.sically trained fellow senators immediately grasped his intent, the Trojan horse image carried neither the instant accessibility of Lincoln"s snake-in-the-bed story nor its memorable originality.
The morning after his City Hall speech, Lincoln met with Welles again in the office of the Hartford Evening Press. When they parted after an hour of discussion, Welles was favorably impressed. "This orator and lawyer has been caricatured. He is not Apollo, but he is not Caliban," he wrote in the next edition of his paper. "He is [in] every way large, brain included, but his countenance shows intellect, generosity, great good nature, and keen discrimination.... He is an effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic."
Preparing to return to Springfield, Lincoln had accomplished more than he ever could have antic.i.p.ated. No longer the distant frontiersman, he had made a name in the East. His possible candidacy was now widely discussed. "I have been sufficiently astonished at my success in the West," Lincoln told a Yale professor who had praised his speech highly. "But I had no thought of any marked success at the East, and least of all that I should draw out such commendations from literary and learned men." When James Briggs told him, "I think your chance for being the next President is equal to that of any man in the country," Lincoln responded, "When I was East several gentlemen made about the same remarks to me that you did to-day about the Presidency; they thought my chances were about equal to the best."
Now there was work to be done at home. A successful bid would require the complete support of the Illinois delegation. To accomplish this, Lincoln would need to bridge the often rancorous divisions within the Republican ranks, a task that would demand all his ample and subtle political skills.
At the end of January 1859, Lyman Trumbull, concerned that the increasingly popular Lincoln might contest his reelection to the Senate, had apprised him of an article "said to have been prepared by Col. John Wentworth," the Republican mayor of Chicago, "the object of which evidently is, to stir up bad feeling between Republicans who were formerly Whigs, & those who were Democrats." The piece suggested bad faith on the Democrats" part, singling out Norman Judd and Trumbull himself, in 1855, and again in 1858, when Lincoln ran a second time against Douglas. "Any effort to put enmity between you and me," Lincoln rea.s.sured Trumbull, "is as idle as the wind...the republicans generally, coming from the old democratic ranks, were as sincerely anxious for my success in the late contest, as I myself.... And I beg to a.s.sure you, beyond all possible cavil, that you can scarcely be more anxious to be sustained two years hence than I am that you shall be so sustained. I can not conceive it possible for me to be a rival of yours.
"A word now for your own special benefit," Lincoln warned in a follow-up note. "You better write no letters which can possibly be distorted into opposition, or quasi opposition to me. There are men on the constant watch for such things out of which to prejudice my peculiar friends against you. While I have no more suspicion of you than I have of my best friend living, I am kept in a constant struggle against suggestions of this sort."
It would require more effort to defuse the increasingly bitter feud between Norman Judd and John Wentworth. In public forums, Wentworth would drag out past wrongs, continuing to accuse Judd and his former Democratic allies of conspiring to defeat Lincoln in 1855, of "bungling" Lincoln"s campaign in 1858, and of working now "to advance Trumbull as a presidential candidate, at Lincoln"s expense."
Lincoln hastened to rea.s.sure Judd, who hoped to run for governor, that the "vague charge that you played me false last year, I believe to be false and outrageous." In 1855, "you did vote for Trumbull against me; and, although I think, and have said a thousand times, that was no injustice to me, I cannot change the fact, nor compel people to cease speaking of it. Ever since that matter occurred, I have constantly labored, as I believe you know, to have all recollection of it dropped." Finally, "as to the charge of your intriguing for Trumbull against me, I believe as little of that as any other charge." If such charges were made, Lincoln promised, they would not "go uncontradicted."
The controversy erupted into public view when Judd brought a libel suit against Wentworth, who tried to retain Lincoln as his counsel, claiming that the "very reason that you may a.s.sign for declining my offer is the very one that urges me to write you. You are friendly to us both. I prefer to put myself in the hands of mutual friends rather than...in the hands of those who have a deep interest in keeping up a quarrel." Of course, Lincoln had no intention of entangling himself in such explosive litigation, but he did help to mediate the altercation. The dispute was resolved without a court fight. Consequently, both Wentworth and Judd remained close to Lincoln and would support his efforts to control the Illinois delegation.
"I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegation," Lincoln wrote Judd, knowing that the former Democrat had influence with the Chicago Press and Tribune, which covered the northern part of the state. "Can you not help me a little in this matter, in your end of the vineyard?" A week later, the Tribune published a resounding editorial on behalf of Lincoln"s candidacy. "You saw what the Tribune said about you," Judd said to Lincoln. "Was it satisfactory?"
On May 10, 1860, the Illinois state Republicans a.s.sembled in Decatur. Buoyed by the noisy enthusiasm his candidacy elicited at the state convention, Lincoln nonetheless recognized that some of the delegates chosen to go to the national convention, though liking him, probably favored Seward or Bates. To head off possible desertions, Lincoln"s friends introduced a resolution on the second day of the meeting: "That Abraham Lincoln is the choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and the delegates from this State are instructed to use all honorable means to secure his nomination by the Chicago Convention, and to vote as a unit for him."
With the Republican National Convention set to begin the following week, Lincoln could rest easy in the knowledge that he had used his time well. Though he often claimed to be a fatalist, declaring that "what is to be will be, and no prayers of ours can reverse the decree," his diligence and shrewd strategy in the months prior to the convention belied his claim. More than all his opponents combined, the country lawyer and local politician had toiled skillfully to increase his chances to become the Republican nominee for president.
CHAPTER 8
SHOWDOWN IN CHICAGO
FORTY THOUSAND VISITORS descended upon Chicago in the middle of May 1860, drawn by the festive excitement surrounding the Republican National Convention. Dozens of trains, mechanical marvels of the age, carried the delegates and supporters of America"s youngest political party to America"s fastest-growing city. All along the routes, as trains roared past the Niagara, up across the majestic Ohio River, and troubled the air of the western frontier, crowds gathered at every bunting-draped station, sounding their enthusiasm for the Republican cause with bra.s.s bands and volleys of cannon fire. Even at crossroads, reporters observed, "small groups were a.s.sembled to lend their countenances to the occasion, and from farm houses the ladies waved their kerchiefs, and farmers in the fields swung their hats."
Of all the trains bound for Chicago, none attracted more attention than the one that began its journey at the Suspension Bridge in Buffalo, New York, and swept to Chicago in an astonishing record time of sixteen hours. The unprecedented speed of the ma.s.sive train was said to amaze every pa.s.senger. A reporter recalled that "when "a mile a minute" was accomplished, the "boldest held his breath," and the timid ones trembled in their boots." Every seat was occupied: in addition to delegates, the train carried dozens of newspapermen, professional applauders, henchmen, office seekers, and prizefighters hired "to keep the peace," recalled one young pa.s.senger, "for in those hot days men"s opinions often cost them broken heads." Amenities included a carload of "such refreshments," one reporter noted, "as lead inevitably to the conclusion that the majority of delegates are among the opponents" of temperance laws.
With boosterish pride, young Chicago was determined to show its best face to the world during the convention. Chicago"s growth in previous decades had been "almost ridiculous," a contemporary magazine suggested. Indeed, "growth is much too slow a word," an English visitor marveled to describe the explosion Chicago had experienced since an 1830 guidebook depicted "a military post and fur station," with wolves prowling the streets at night, and a meager population of twelve families who would bunk together in the town"s well-defended fort for safety each winter. Thirty years later, Chicago boasted a population of more than a hundred thousand, and the distinction of being "the first grain market in the world," surpa.s.sing not only Odessa, "the great grain market of Russia, but all of Europe." It had supplanted St. Louis as the chief marketplace for the vast herds of cattle that grazed the northwest prairies, and had become "the first lumber-market in the world." Newcomers to the bustling city were dazzled by its "miles of wharves crowded with shipping...long lines of stately warehouses," and "crowds of men busy in the active pursuit of trade." Only recently, its streets had been raised from the mud and water by a bold decision to elevate every building and roadway to a level of twelve feet above Lake Michigan.
"Our city has been chosen, here to throw to the winds the broad banner of Republicanism," the Press and Tribune proclaimed, "and here to name the leader who shall lead all our hosts to victory." Lavish preparations were made to give the arriving trains a reception to remember. Chicagoans who lived on Michigan Avenue were asked to illuminate their houses. "A most magically beautiful effect was the result," one reporter noted, "the lights flashing back from and multiplied countlessly in the waters of the Lake sh.o.r.e basin." Thousands of spectators lined the sh.o.r.e of the lake, and as the trains moved along the pier, "half minute guns were fired by the Chicago Light Artillery, and rockets shot off from the foot of Jackson Street." No one present, the reporter observed, would forget the effect of "artillery pealing, the flight of the rockets, the gleaming windows from the entire residence front of our city, the vast depot edifice filled with the eager crowd."
Hotels and boardinghouse proprietors had spent weeks sprucing up their establishments; private citizens were asked to open their homes; and restaurants promised hearty meals at low prices. The most popular luncheon in town included a gla.s.s of four-year-old ale and a ham sandwich for ten cents. As packed trains continued to steam into the thronged city, the number of eager Republican visitors on Chicago"s streets climbed to forty thousand.
"I thought the city was crowded yesterday," one amazed reporter exclaimed on the day before the convention was set to open, "but it was as loose and comfortable as a last year"s shoe beside the wedging and packing of today. The streets are full, and appear very like conduits leading off the overflowings of the hotels, where huge crowds are constantly pouring out as if they were spouted up from below in some popular eruption."
Even billiard rooms were enlisted to accommodate the staggering crowds. At a certain hour each evening, the games were brought to an abrupt halt as mattresses were laid across the tables to create beds for the sleepy visitors. Looking in on one such establishment at midnight, a reporter saw 130 people stretched out on billiard tables "with a zest, from the fatigues of the day, that would have excited the sympathy of the most unfeeling bosom."
"The city is thronged with Republicans," wrote the Chicago Evening Journal. "Republicans from the woods of Maine and the green valleys of all New England; Republicans from the Golden Gate and the old plantation, Republicans from everywhere. What seems a brilliant festival is but the rallying for a battle. It is an army with banners!" Amid "this murmur of the mult.i.tude, thought reverts to a time long past," the Journal reminded readers, "when a single car and one small chamber could have conveyed them all," when the antislavery principle that "now blossoms white over the land was deemed the vision of enthusiasts, ridiculed, shunned and condemned."