1858 (43 page)

Lincoln was at first disappointed in his loss of the election in the legislature, despite his popular-vote victory. “It hurts too much to laugh and I am too old to cry,” he told one journalist. He was proud, though, that he had done much for the antislavery cause, even in defeat. He wrote Henry Asbury two weeks later, “The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats.” He told him too, that the 1858 election did not decide the slavery question for him or anyone else. “Another explosion will soon come.”

As for himself, he knew that the elections had made him a national figure. He said later that after he lost on election night, he nearly stumbled while walking home on a dirt path. “I recovered and said to myself that it is a slip and not a fall,” just as his loss had been a slip and not a fall. He brushed off efforts of friends to console him. He told all, “I am neither dead nor dying.”
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Why did the Republicans, so hopeful on the eve of the legislature’s balloting, lose in Illinois? Party leaders had numerous excuses: Lincoln’s liberalism, poor planning, disproportioned districts, voter fraud, and a rainy election day.
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What effect did the debates have? Some historians have claimed that the debates were a small part of the larger contest in Illinois, that they were merely seven speeches Lincoln and Douglas made out of a total of some sixty throughout the campaign. Others argued that his strong finish in the debates enabled Lincoln to defeat Douglas in the popular vote. Some said the result of the debates was pretty much a draw and others claimed that they had helped Douglas more than Lincoln.

One analyst noted that Douglas won because he carried seven of the nine Senate districts and sixteen of the twenty-one House districts in the central part of Illinois, even though the vote was close in each. Victories in those counties gave him enough Democratic legislators to bring him victory. Lincoln only carried one of the seventeen House districts in the southern third of the state and in none of its Senate districts. Lincoln did carry four of the seven counties where the debates were held, two in the northern part of the state and two in the central. Ironically, each man lost his home county; Sangamon went for Douglas and Cook for Lincoln. So, in a sense, the slavery issue central to the debates that enabled Lincoln to become a national figure may have brought about his defeat in the Senate race.
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However, another, stronger argument could be made. Just over five thousand Democrats shunned Douglas and voted for Buchanan’s Danite candidate. Surely, some other Democrats voted for Lincoln or simply stayed home. If Buchanan had not intervened in the race, Douglas might well have won the popular vote too, and that would have made an enormous difference two years later at the presidential nominating conventions, where Lincoln’s forces would not be able to proclaim him the actual “winner” in the Senate race.

The residents of Ohio, galvanized against slavery by the Oberlin rescue and the sham trials defended by Buchanan, voted Republican in large numbers in 1858, giving the new party complete control of both houses of the state legislature. A year later, in 1859, radical Republican governor Salmon Chase was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio. His successor as governor, the equally radical Roelliff Brinkerhoff, was elected by a wide margin of votes to replace him.

The Republicans had achieved a remarkable victory in the 1858 elections. They had managed to herald one main issue, a grudging acceptance of slavery where it had flourished for years in Southern states but opposition to the spread of slavery into the territories and new states. But they won over many converts by brilliantly tying their campaign to important economic issues. The Republican congressional and state tickets favored a protective tariff to help local manufacturing and commercial businesses thrive, freer banking practices, the building of a transcontinental railroad, cheap land sales to homesteaders to promote the development of the western territories, and substantial federal funds for the improvements of harbors and waterways to make the commercial shipping trade, domestic and foreign, more prosperous.
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Yet the Republicans managed to connect these issues to the moral issue of slavery. In state after state in the 1858 elections, the Republicans constantly charged that it was the monolithic, evil “slave power” (the Southern slave states) that prevented Northerners from achieving any commercial or economic gains. The Republicans conducted a moral crusade but carefully framed it as also an economic one.
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The Republicans won because they understood that while their brand-new party contained many abolitionists, it also had as members tens of thousands of former Whigs and antislavery Democrats. It was led by some of the new radicals, but most of the leadership came from the Whig and Democratic parties; they had significant fund-raising and campaign experience. These leaders also realized that the 1850s were a time of rapid change in politics and they were able to capitalize on the people’s continual desire for new leadership. For example, nearly 90 percent of the men in Congress following the 1858 elections were not there prior to 1852.
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The new Congress meant, too, that the Republicans now had far more seats on important policy-making committees than they did before, and more than the old Whigs previously had. As an example, following the 1858 elections, two-thirds of the members of the powerful Ways and Means Committee were brand-new members to Congress; most were Republicans.
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And politically the Republicans were not the old Whigs, a party that died because it was torn apart by the slavery issue. The main reason the Republican Party came into existence was the opposition to slavery by all of its members. The new party was held together by that overriding policy, and while the members may have differed on some other policies, they never differed on slavery. That foundation held them all together. The Republicans, on issues and on the campaign trail, were much stronger than the old, splintered Whigs, something the Democrats did not realize.
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The Republicans had been born as a radical party, but by 1858 they were no longer just a rump political congregation, but a well-organized political organization that had replaced the Whigs as the second major party and would be a powerful force in American politics for years to come.
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The Democrats were grim. In a published letter, President Buchanan said that the numerous defeats of his party spelled doom for the nation. If the Republicans continued to win elections, he said, “The fountain of free government will then be poisoned at its source, and we must end, as history proves, in a military despotism. A Democratic Republic, all agree, cannot long survive unless sustained by public virtue. When this is corrupted…[it will] wither and die.”

Whose fault was it? The president did not blame the lingering animosity of many people toward the Supreme Court over the 1857
Dred Scott
decision, the Kansas debates, or the ineptitude of his administration. He told the party they had lost simply because the Republicans had managed to raise more campaign funds than the Democrats, and that it was a sad day when the richest party won the election.

Others, of course, blamed the president for not supporting many candidates and for spending much of his time in what turned out to be a disastrous campaign to stop Douglas in Illinois. None analyzed Buchanan’s failures more succinctly than John Forney, the man he had scorned and the man who worked so hard to defeat J. Glancy Jones. Forney had warned that Buchanan’s betrayal of fellow Democrats would come back to haunt the party. “Such has been the result,” Forney told a dinner crowd in Camden, New Jersey, after the fall elections. “Many and many a glorious Democrat placed upon the Democratic ticket has been sent to obscurity because the opposition party has risen against the mistakes of the federal administration and because the Democratic party, through the conventions of its office holders [Buchanan], has been committed to those mistakes and pledge to support them as a portion of the party duty.”

Regardless of who was to blame, the elections of 1858 proved a staggering defeat for the Democrats and the White House. In an abrupt note, the president seemed to acknowledge his role in the debacle, writing his niece, “We have met the enemy…and we are theirs…we had a merry time of it, laughing, among other things, over our crushing defeat. It is so great that it is almost absurd.”
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Chapter Fourteen

After the 1858 fall elections were held, William Tecumseh Sherman, a former U.S. Army lieutenant living in Kansas following the collapse of his latest professional venture, developed yet another scheme to make money that would fail, as all of his myriad business schemes failed. This one involved a plan to sell corn from a road stand at the side of a highway to hungry prospectors from the East and Midwest. These adventurers were on their way to Pike’s Peak, Colorado, to join the thousands already there following the discovery of large deposits of gold in the foothills of the Rockies.

The redheaded Sherman was a wiry, thin man with a long, gaunt face, receding hairline, short beard, and moustache. In the middle of a bitter ’58 winter, he had begun construction of roadside warehouses for his spring corn operation. Sherman had to put up with stiff prairie winds and low temperatures. It was so cold, he wrote, “I could hardly hold my pen.” Sherman, his hands covered with calluses and full of splinters from the construction, was more despondent than he had been in his entire life. It had been eighteen years since he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and went into the army, hopeful of a successful life there. Now, shivering and depressed in the winter of 1858 as he drew crude plans for the corn warehouses, the chilly, biting Kansas air harsh against his face, Sherman wrote of his sad, unfilled life in which one disappointment followed another, “I am doomed to be a vagabond. I look upon myself as a dead cock in the pit, not worthy of future notice.”
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