Coming Fury, Volume 1 (12 page)

On the second ballot the trend was clear. Seward lost votes in New England, and Pennsylvania swung obediently away from Cameron into the Lincoln column. In all, Lincoln picked up 79 votes while Seward was gaining only 11; the tabulation showed Seward with 184½, Lincoln with 181, and the rest nowhere. The band wagon was rolling at last, and the convention began to understand that those delegates who had gone to bed at all the night before had done so under a mistaken assumption. Seward was not going to make it.

The third ballot did it. Seward lost a few votes, in New England
and in Ohio, and when the roll call was ended, Seward had dropped to 180 and Lincoln had gone to 231½, just one and one-half votes away from victory. No candidate ever got that close to the top without going the rest of the way, and before a fourth roll call could be ordered (while state delegations were furiously canvassing their memberships), Delegate D. K. Cartter, of Ohio, got to his feet and won the attention of the chair. Cartter was a big man with a shock of bristling black hair, afflicted by an unfortunate impediment in his speech, but the impediment did not matter now. The crowd collectively held its breath, while he forced out the words: “I rise (eh) Mr. Chairman (eh) to announce the change of four votes of Ohio from Mr. Chase to Mr. Lincoln.” There was a brief pause, and then an enormous yell went up, while chairmen of other delegations fought for a chance to put their own change of heart on the record.

On the roof there was a man who had been put there to fire off a salute from waiting small-bore cannon once a nomination had been made. He heard the wild racket coming up from below and thrust his head through a skylight, gesturing madly to get someone to tell him what had happened. Some functionary, tally sheet in hand, saw him and shouted: “Fire the salute—Old Abe is nominated!” and the guns promptly went off, whereon the mob outside took up the shouting. The noise from outside stimulated the hoarse crowd within to new endeavors, and the racket became so intense that the banging of the cannon overhead could not be heard. Wisps of powder smoke drifted down into the auditorium, and a woman in the gallery wrote that although everybody seemed to be joining in the cheering, “I think everyone was half joyful and half frightened”; some of the yelling seemed to come from men who wanted to reassure themselves that what they had just done would really be for the country’s good.

State chairmen continued to shout for recognition so that their timely switch to the winner could be properly recorded. Someone brought in an immense picture of Lincoln and began to tack it up over the rostrum. Delegates began grabbing state standards and started a jubilant procession up and down the crowded aisles. The stunned New York delegates refused to let their own standard be carried in this parade. A newspaperman saw Thurlow Weed, over-come
by the supreme disappointment of his life, pressing his finger tips against his eyelids to keep from weeping. After a time, however, the spokesman for the dejected New York delegation, orator Evarts, got to the platform and, standing on a table, expressed his grief at the convention’s failure to nominate Seward and with tears running down his cheeks moved that the nomination be made unanimous. Somehow the convention managed to pass this motion, whereupon there was adjournment for supper and the exhausted delegates headed for their hotels—the Seward men stumping along, all downcast, in glum silence, the Westerners trying to carry on with their jollification. Some of these had gone into such an emotional state that although they had not tasted liquor they lurched and staggered like drunken men. At the dining room in the Tremont Hotel, an awry-eyed celebrant announced loudly that “Abe Lincoln has no money and no bullies, but he has the people by the—,” and when a waiter thrust a menu under his nose, he shoved it aside with a scornful: “Go to the devil—what do I want to eat for? Abe Lincoln is nominated, G— d— it, and I’m going to live on Liberty.” Then he grabbed the menu and said he would take “a great deal of everything.”
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He had pretty well expressed Chicago’s mood. An unvarnished Westerner was going to be the next President, and for tonight everybody would take a great deal of everything. Down the streets went disorganized processions, with much whooping and cavorting. From nowhere men appeared carrying fence rails—whether authentic relics of the nominee’s rail-splitting youth or run-of-the-mill rails split by someone else made no difference—and these were carried and displayed and brandished, hour after hour. Cannon on top of the Tremont Hotel fired a 100-gun salute, the offices of the Chicago
Tribune
were gaily illuminated, and unheard-of quantities of whisky were consumed. At the Briggs House, where the Cameron people had their headquarters, hundreds of Pennsylvanians presented “a scene of indescribable joy and excitement.” (As the group that had set the band wagon rolling, the Pennsylvania Republicans could count on abundant rewards when the new administration took office.) They would build rail pens, they declared, in every school yard in Pennsylvania, and they sent a telegram to Decatur, Illinois, where there was alleged to be a fence made of rails split by Lincoln
in 1830. This fence the Pennsylvanians wanted to buy,
en bloc
. Other groups also wanted to buy those rails, and Decatur did a brisk business while the supply lasted.
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The convention somehow finished its business that evening, while Chicago celebrated. For Vice-President it nominated Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine—another choice reflecting the professional politicians’ profound concern over making the proper appeal to all elements in this elated but fundamentally disharmonious party. There was powerful sentiment among the delegates for Cassius Clay, of Kentucky. He received more than 100 votes on the first ballot, and might easily have been nominated by acclamation—at one point half of the people in the Wigwam seemed to be chanting “Clay! Clay! Clay!” But the professionals got things in hand. Clay was an out-and-out radical on the slavery issue, he came from west of the Alleghenies, and, like Lincoln, he was a former Whig. Hamlin, a good friend of Seward, was a moderate, an Easterner, and a former Democrat—and, altogether, he would give the ticket better balance. Hamlin it was, on the second ballot. Then, after naming a committee to go to Springfield and formally tell Lincoln that he was the candidate, the convention adjourned.

Cassius Clay was in Chicago at this time, and he was wholeheartedly glad that Lincoln had been nominated, but he did not want any illusions about what was probably going to come of this convention’s work. A Kansas Republican recalled afterward how he and some friends, on the night before the nominations were made, went to a meeting of border-state delegates and met Clay. Clay was impressive—huge, powerful, fearless, as became one who had preached emancipation for years in a slave state, defying his enemies to silence him. (He was a distinguished knife fighter, which probably helped him in that career.) At this meeting he warned the Kansans: “Gentlemen, we are on the brink of a great civil war.”

They had probably heard that before, Clay continued, but as a Southerner he wanted them to know that if the North elected a candidate on the platform the Republicans had just adopted, the South would fight. He was not going to run away from that war, but it gave him a deep anxiety about the kind of man the party might nominate. “You must give us a leader at this time who will inspire our confidence and our courage. We must have such a leader
or we are lost.” Then, impressively: “We want you to name Abraham Lincoln. He was born among us and we believe he understands us.”
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Like Clay and like Jefferson Davis, Lincoln had been born in Kentucky.

But Clay’s somber warning was not on anybody’s mind tonight. A good part of the Northwest, apparently, was taking Lincoln’s nomination as a great victory, and as the night trains carried out-of-town visitors and delegates off to their homes, every track-side village put on its own celebration—people shouting, tar barrels ablaze, drums being beaten, firearms banging, and more fence rails in evidence. On the train that carried Halstead and other Ohioans toward Cincinnati, the Lincoln enthusiasts were simply too groggy to respond to these evidences of enthusiasm. Halstead wrote in amazement: “I never before saw a company of persons so prostrated by continued excitement.”
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CHAPTER TWO

Robert E. Lee, of Virginia, lieutenant colonel in the 2nd United States Cavalry, a colonel by brevet and acting commander of the Department of Texas, took a preoccupied look at political matters in this haunted summer of 1860 and wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his friend, Major Earl Van Dorn.

“The papers,” he wrote, “will give you the news of the Baltimore convention. If Judge Douglas would now withdraw & join himself & party to aid in the election of Breckinridge, he might retrieve himself before the country & Lincoln be defeated. Politicians I fear are too selfish to become martyrs.”
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It was not a summer for martyrs and the withdrawal would not take place, and whether it would have changed things very much is open to question anyway. Politics had lost its flexibility, and the loss reflected grass-roots sentiment. Too many leaders had dug in for a last-ditch stand—whether for high principle, for practical political profit, or for a blend of both—and although it was increasingly clear that the result was likely to be disastrous, everybody felt that the necessary concessions ought to be made by someone else; it was always the other side that was stiff-necked and obstinate.
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The politicians who were driving on toward a shattering climax were supported by plain citizens whose response seemed to be almost automatic. Lee’s attitude was a case in point. He had as little of the fire-eating extremist in him as any man in America, but he was a man of his time, of his class, and of his section—and the cotton-state extremists were somehow speaking for him.
Instinctively he was aligning himself with them; oppressed by the obvious drift of things, he could say no more than that it was up to Douglas to master self-interest and to retire from the struggle.

As Colonel Lee suspected, there were too many candidates for the presidency, but the problem was not so much their number as the sharp divisive forces that insisted on bringing them forward.

The Republicans had named Mr. Lincoln, and the Constitutional Union party had named Mr. Bell. Now the one and indivisible Democracy had broken into halves. Its Northern wing, insisting that it was the National Democratic party, had nominated Senator Douglas, and its Southern wing, bearing the name of the Constitutional Democratic party, had nominated John C. Breckinridge, currently the Vice-President of the United States; and so now there were four tickets, each supported by men who felt that they were following the only possible path to salvation. A Republican victory was almost certain, and the Democrats, who had the most to lose from such a victory, were blindly and with a fated stubbornness doing everything they could to bring that victory to pass.

Senator Douglas, as a matter of fact, had been prepared to withdraw. He had even written a message of withdrawal, confiding slightly different versions of it to two of his party’s leaders for issuance in case such a step would prevent a break in the party, but it had not been issued. Baltimore had simply put the seal on what had been begun at Charleston. Northern sectionalism, finding its voice in the unrestrained jubilation of the Republican ceremony at the Wigwam, had its counterpart in a Southern sectionalism which would hold to the letter of its own restrictive law though the heavens fell. The story of 1860 is the story of a great nation, marching to the wild music of bands, with flaring torches and with banners and with enthusiastic shouts, moving down a steep place into the sea.

According to schedule the Democratic convention reconvened in Baltimore on June 18. Caleb Cushing, profoundly dignified in blue coat with brass buttons, bearing something of the air of a latter-day Daniel Webster, was again in the chair as delegates and spectators filed into the Front Street Theater, and the tension that had pervaded the air at Charleston seemed greater than ever. Right at the outset Mr. Cushing had a problem. After the adjournment at
Charleston, conventions in certain Southern states had named new delegations, friendly to Douglas, to replace the ones that had walked out in April, and these were present in Baltimore—along with the delegations they were supposed to replace. Which groups were legally entitled to seats? What the convention would finally do depended in large part on the decision that would be made on this point, and the chairman was under immense pressure. The men from the Northwest were confident, almost arrogant. They would nominate the Little Giant at any cost, and they would begin by making certain that the new Southern delegates were accepted, and they insisted on this so strenuously that the first day’s session was one long wrangle. Cushing ruled that all delegates who were on the roll when the Charleston convention adjourned were still delegates as far as he was concerned; the chairman, he held, had no power to rule on conflicting credentials. The matter was passed to a credentials committee for determination, and there was much uproar on the floor, with hissing and cat-calling from the crowded galleries.
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