1858 (26 page)

Of his very last speech in Springfield, a reporter for the
Illinois State Journal
wrote that it “was one of his very best efforts, distinguished for its clearness and force…one of the most eloquent appeals ever addressed to the American people” and that it “was received with spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm unequalled by anything ever before enacted in this city.”
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Even though polling suggested that the Democrats were running slightly ahead in many key counties in the state, Lincoln, his spirits aroused by the reception in the last days of the campaign, was very hopeful that he would win. He wrote Republican state chairman Norman Judd, “I now have a high degree of confidence that we shall succeed.” Douglas also sensed victory, and victory over both Lincoln and Buchanan. Each had their supporters in the press. In the South, though, newspaper editors denounced both men. The editor of the
Mississippian
called them “a pair of depraved, blustering, mischievous, lowdown demagogues.”
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Who won the Lincoln–Douglas debates? It is impossible to tell. The newspapers provided no intelligent assessment of who triumphed because they were all partisan. There were no exit polls on election day that could be used to evaluate the vote between those who attended the debates and those who did not. The huge crowds that they attracted—some seventy thousand people—were not a barometer either because not everyone who attended the encounters voted and many were children.

Many in the press pronounced the American political system the winner because the campaign and debates gave the entire nation electrifying dialogue on slavery from two well-prepared debaters. “Douglas and Lincoln are both giants, and the way they discuss political questions before immense crowds of people is an admirable illustration of the workings of our institutions,” wrote one eastern reporter.
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Douglas and Lincoln each believed that they had presented themselves well. Douglas had reminded the liberal voters of Illinois again and again that he was in favor of territorial residents prohibiting slavery if they so chose and had again, in his oratorical wizardry and grasp of issues, shown all why he had been such an effective U.S. senator.

All Honest Abe and the Little Giant could do after the final debate and last stump speech was wait for the verdict of their neighbors in Illinois on election day, an election that would conclude a furious campaign that the Republicans hoped would install them as the dominant party in the United States and somehow bring the end of slavery one step closer.

Chapter Nine

No one in America had supported the political ambitions of President James Buchanan more strongly, or for a longer period of time, and served as a closer and more loyal friend than John Forney. The president’s fellow Pennsylvanian had, over twenty years, worked tirelessly as Buchanan’s aide, ran his campaigns, gave him advice, raised money, and twisted the arms of politicians to curry favor for his friend. Forney had also been the editor of the
Washington Union
, the Washington, DC, newspaper controlled by the Democratic Party that served as the official organ of the White House when the Democrats occupied it. Forney loved the newspaper job because it enabled him to work as a journalist and, at the same time, as a political operative for the party. As editor, he used his powerful post to promote the career of his friend, James Buchanan.

Forney had joined Buchanan in the late 1830s when Forney was in his early twenties and had been with him ever since. Forney worked hard for Buchanan and was always faithful, but Forney could be a difficult man. He had a reputation as a drinker. He was an energetic, impetuous, excitable, and sometimes very angry person who, even his best friends admitted, could talk a man to death. He had no regard for money; he was often broke and borrowed funds from friends, sometimes forgetting to repay them. He had a violent temper, took umbrage at the innocent remarks of others, misread people’s intentions, and exhibited a great deal of paranoia. These negative traits, always apparent in his defense of his friend Buchanan, annoyed people. Yet no one could question his devotion to the politician. Forney, who was forty years old, had enjoyed his finest hour during the months of September and October of 1856. Buchanan’s presidential campaign sputtered in those months, especially in his native Pennsylvania, which he had to win to capture the White House.

The devoted Forney, the head of the state Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, became a dynamo in those two critical months. He personally took charge of the Pennsylvania state campaign, changing its tactics to combat the surging third-party threat, the American Party, dispensing funds, dispatching speakers, arguing with newspaper editors, and, with a small army of volunteers, helping to get out one of the largest voter turnouts in state history, especially newly registered Irish voters. In those last few tumultuous weeks, amid evening torch-lit parades, afternoon rallies, and endless receptions, Forney, operating on little sleep, did much to win Pennsylvania for his friend, Buchanan, by just a thousand votes, and with it, the presidency.

He greatly admired Buchanan and had urged him to run for president for years. He had argued with him that Buchanan could have won the 1844 Democratic nomination if he had campaigned through the Northeast and let the party leaders know he wanted the job. Buchanan ignored his advice, did nothing, and was never a contender for the nomination. Forney said his friend could have captured the 1852 Democratic nomination over Franklin Pierce with even more ease if he had only tried. He did not. Buchanan always thanked Forney for his work, noting in 1852, as always, “the warmth of your friendship.”
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In the weeks and months following the successful 1856 presidential election, the normally grating Forney was simply overbearing in his relationship to the president-elect’s other political aides, many of them newcomers. He was intent on drawing attention to himself in newspaper stories. Others in the Buchanan inner circle were mad at him for trying to make the public believe that he carried far more influence with the president than anyone else. The president’s other advisers, U.S. Senator William Bigelow, John Appleton, who had worked with him in England, and Congressman J. Glancy Jones, of Pennsylvania, were among them. Jones, a minister-turned-politician from a safe Democratic district, admired in the halls of Congress by Southerners as well as Northerners, quickly became the new president’s right-hand man and was made the “whip,” or presidential legislative captain, in the House of Representatives.
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A rift between the president and Forney started in those frantic post-election days. Forney pressed Buchanan to make him the editor of the
Washington Union
again, but the two men who owned the paper disliked the argumentative Forney and refused to go along with his stewardship of the influential journal. The editor of the
New York Herald
, James Gordon Bennett, whom Buchanan had just brought back into the Democratic fold after Bennett supported Fremont in the last election, despised Forney and complained to the president that he was the wrong man for the job. Several powerful Southern senators who did not care for Forney also argued against him.

Instead of ordering them to take Forney for the
Union
, which he could have done, the president caved in and told Forney that his other aide, John Appleton, would get the post. Forney was furious, but soon had another idea. Why not make him the other U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, filling a recently vacated seat? The state legislature was scheduled to vote on a successor in January 1857. Why not pressure them to pick Forney? Would not his substantial foreign experience as Buchanan’s long-time aide enable him to serve as a good senator?

The president agreed to do so but never fully used his political muscle to win the post for Forney. Buchanan wrote a few letters and talked to several state legislators on his behalf, but did little more. Because the president’s endorsement of him was so weak, Forney lost the seat to Simon Cameron in the legislature’s vote. Forney placed all the blame on Buchanan, whom he said had deliberately bungled the job. Forney, disenchantment with his friend growing daily, then tried to win himself an appointment to the cabinet, but Buchanan turned him down.

Forney not only felt abandoned but betrayed, and by an old friend for whom he had worked tirelessly all of his life. He wrote a passionate letter to Jeremiah Black, the new attorney general, in the spring of 1857: “Read this letter to Mr. B. Ask him if he is dead to the past in which I have served him almost like a slave. Ask him if he forgets the dark hours when his friends fled from him and I stood alone, a monument to fidelity.”

Buchanan, as usual, did not understand, or care to understand, Forney’s deep-seated unhappiness. Telling Forney that he was “grateful for the services which you have rendered to the Democratic Party,” he offered his old friend two posts that he thought would satisfy him, head of the Naval Office in Philadelphia and consul at Liverpool, England. The president told him that he had “the earnest hope that you will accept one or the other,” and wrote that “I…gratify my own warm feelings of friendship for yourself.”

Forney not only turned down the posts, but dispatched a savage letter to Buchanan, telling him that the president knew very well why Forney would not work in his administration. He then reminded him how hard he had labored for the Democrats over the years and told Buchanan that he was “a man to whose cause I have given the best years of my life, and upon whose election to the Presidency I have expended every effort I could command, and nearly every dollar I had in the world.”

He angrily told his former mentor that he would find his own job and never rely on party patronage or Buchanan’s charity again. “I am about to embark once more upon the ocean of the future. I have suffered deep and bitter humiliation since you have been elected, the gibes of false friends and the open exultation of open foes.”
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Finally, with no decent job or prospects of a job as a reward for his work on the campaign and twenty years of friendship, and with mounting debts for his family of five children, a distraught Forney asked his wife to write a letter to the president in which she pleaded for work for her husband and suggested the job of postmaster in Philadelphia. Mrs. Forney’s request was set aside too.
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Buchanan felt badly for the irate Forney and offered him several poorly paying government jobs—an insult, really—and Forney, scorned, turned them all down. He did some freelance writing to pay his bills, but little else.
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No one in the national Democratic Party helped Forney either, since no one was in a hurry to back the wrong side in the quarrel, and so Buchanan’s former close friend floundered. He had become a political pariah. His crime? He told everyone, with great bitterness, that it was spending his life helping his close friend become president.

Buchanan was unable to patch up his differences with Forney. Someone in the state party made arrangements for him to return to his old job as the editor of the
Pennsylvanian
, one of the party’s newspapers, and he soon founded the
Philadelphia Press
, a paper that he turned into a very powerful journal in just a year, even introducing a national edition. The new job not only gave Forney a forum for his opinions of the party, public policy, and Buchanan, all of them unfavorable, but once again significant influence as a party leader in Pennsylvania. He now had a chance, too, to use the newspapers to help win election of, or defeat, state and national candidates.

The president, of course, never considered for a moment that the falling-out with John Forney was his fault and told everyone that Forney had caused the deep wound between them and had made no effort to heal it. He wrote friend and party political operative Joseph Baker at the beginning of January 1858, that he was sorry that Forney had abandoned him. “I mourn over Forney. I fear he can never return to us and yet he must feel awkward in his new associations. They will, I trust, at least make the fortune of his paper.”
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