Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (18 page)

On one issue Republicans were broadly agreed: they stood to suffer serious electoral damage following the abolitionist John Brown’s astonishing but ineffectual incitement of slave rebellion in October 1859. In the hysteria that followed Brown’s botched attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, conservatives damned the party as sponsors of the abolitionist’s revolutionary schemes. Lincoln called the charge “an electioneering dodge,” but it was not without foundation.
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Some Republicans had certainly been involved in financing and planning Old Brown’s ventures. Moreover, Republicans’ assertion of their constitutional conservatism could not mask some admiration for Brown’s brave bearing as captive and martyr. Lincoln’s own comments hinted at that ambivalence. Speaking in Kansas, he declared the attack wrong on two counts: “It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” The ballot box, not “violence, bloodshed and treason,” was the constitutionally prescribed means of effecting change. But, he also noted, Brown—who “agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong”—had shown “great courage, rare unselfishness.”
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At bottom, Lincoln and other moderate Republicans joined with radicals in approving the underlying sentiments that drove Brown on, even as they recognized the justice of his execution. Still, the party leadership’s protestations of conservatism, allied with shrewd Democrat-bashing, proved convincing enough to prevent a hemorrhage of support in the free states. The raid, though, ended any hope of engineering an alliance with anti-Buchanan oppositionists in the alarmed border South.

By the close of 1859 several out-of-state papers were floating Lincoln’s name in connection with the Republican presidential ticket, stories which he read in the Illinois press. Since Pennsylvania and Illinois were essential to overall victory, some called for a ticket led by the Quaker state’s Simon Cameron or John M. Read, with Lincoln as the running mate. One of Cameron’s supporters proposed this to Lincoln, who replied politely but firmly, “I shall be heartily for it,
after
it shall have been fairly nominated by a Republican national convention; and I can not be committed to it
before.
”
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Keeping options open was the prudent action of a man who understood that he could do only so much to influence the larger events which would decide the presidential nomination, but that he was by no means powerless. From the closing months of 1859 to the gathering of the Republican convention Lincoln actively worked to make himself better known.

First, he collaborated happily in the publication of his 1858 debates with Douglas. The project was a striking success. A substantial but inexpensive book, which also included his Ohio speeches of 1859, appeared in the spring. Thirty thousand copies had sold by June and a third edition was published to meet the demand. A second project which Lincoln now tolerated, having been unenthusiastic a year earlier, was a short biographical sketch for a Republican paper, the
Chester County Times,
in Pennsylvania. The enterprise was the brainchild of Jesse Fell, who wanted to use his connections in his native state to bring the Illinoisan into sharper political focus. The “little sketch,” as Lincoln called it, was spare, modest, and hinted at his characteristic wit. It summarized his ancestry, humble origins, and political career in just a few hundred words. “There is not much of it,” he told Fell, “for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.” He was anxious that it should not be attributed to his pen. The editor of the
Chester County Times
fleshed out the sketch, which subsequently appeared in many other Republican sheets.
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More influential still in projecting Lincoln to a wider audience was the address he prepared after accepting an invitation from Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. By the time Lincoln arrived in New York City in late February 1860, he had had a few months in which to research and write his speech, and—with a cultured eastern audience in mind—to buy a new suit. A new organizing committee, including Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and other local party leaders hostile to Seward, turned Lincoln’s engagement into one of a series of lectures to be given by prominent out-of-state Republicans and designed to reach beyond the party faithful. They also moved the meetings to Cooper Union in Manhattan. Lincoln learned of the change of venue only on his arrival in the city, and spent his first day adjusting his text for a less formally religious audience. He also sat for the celebrated photographer Mathew Brady, who managed—by dint of some crafty retouching—to transform a plain man into quite a handsome figure.
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The speech proved a stunning success. Although Lincoln’s name was well known, most New Yorkers were expecting a rough-edged western stump speaker, but—despite his incongruous appearance and ungainliness—he commanded his audience with a weighty speech which blended historical detail, cogent political analysis, and moral intransigence. Drawing on weeks of painstaking research into the views of the Constitution’s framers, he argued that none denied the federal government’s power over slavery in the territories, which they “marked . . . as an evil not to be extended.” It was Douglas’s Nebraska Act, serving the purposes of southern sectionalists, which marked a radical departure from settled orthodoxy. The so-called Black Republicans were fundamentally conservative nationalists, resisting the novel program of southern extremists. They had neither designed nor encouraged John Brown’s “peculiar” raid, “an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate.” Southerners who recklessly threatened secession if the Republicans won in 1860 were the real disunionists, adopting the “cool” logic of the highwayman who blamed his victims for any resulting violence. Republicans’ duty was to avoid “
passion and ill temper,
” persuade the South that the party intended “to let them alone,” stand up to disunionist threats, and maintain its policy of quarantining slavery. In a sermonic climax that would not have been out of place in Beecher’s church, Lincoln declared: “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.”
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Lincoln captured by Mathew Brady only hours before delivering his address at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860. The picture and speech did much to establish Lincoln in the public mind as a dignified political heavyweight.

The applause, laughter, and real warmth of the audience’s response prefigured the enthusiastic reviews of the political press. The
New York Times
extolled his ability “to elucidate and convince . . . to delight and electrify.” The journalist Noah Brooks was ecstatic: “He’s the greatest man since St. Paul. . . . No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” All four city newspapers printed the speech in full, many others followed, and it soon appeared in pamphlet form. Lincoln’s subsequent itinerary in New England became a triumphal tour, during which he was extravagantly introduced as the nation’s next president or vice president. The speech also posed its problems. As he explained to his wife, “The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print.” He returned to Illinois exhausted but convinced that the presidential nomination was not beyond his grasp; as Herndon put it, his dazzling success “had stimulated his self-confidence to unwonted proportions.” It had also dramatically increased the sense amongst key Illinois Republicans that Lincoln might be more than just a “favourite son.”
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The state party was essential to Lincoln’s hopes, and he had worked energetically but discreetly to achieve two particular objectives in relation to it. First, he had had to ensure that the factionalism which had marked Illinois Republicanism since its birth remained subordinate to a sense of common purpose. Republicans were a philosophical coalition embracing a variety of only partially fused political traditions: pragmatic free-soilers and radical abolitionists, the foreign-born and nativist ex–Know-Nothings, conservative Whigs and former Democrats. In such a context, personal feuds, parochial resentments, and local conflicts proved difficult to isolate and control. Most damaging of all was the struggle for control of the party in Chicago. Here the feud involved the shrewd state senator Norman Judd and his
Tribune
clique on one side, and Mayor John Wentworth, owner of the
Daily Democrat,
and his supporters on the other. Wentworth blamed Judd for Lincoln’s defeat in 1858, questioned his financial probity, and attacked him daily in the
Democrat
when Judd declared his candidacy for governor. Retaliating, Judd brought a libel suit against the wealthy mayor. Reconciliation through the two most senior Republicans serving in elective office was out of the question: Governor William H. Bissell was too ill, and Senator Trumbull was too closely connected to the ex-Democrat
Tribune
faction.
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Both sides appealed to Lincoln, who knew that these local complications threatened the Republicans’ ability to carry the state in the national election—with consequences for Lincoln himself. As Wentworth rhetorically asked him, “How can you expect to be nominated when your chief commercial city wheels out of line, [and] elects a Douglas Mayor[?]” Lincoln could afford to see neither group marginalized. Judd was chairman of the party’s central committee; Mayor Wentworth’s “efficient aid & cooperation” was essential to winning the state. Lincoln was ready to act as peacemaker, but knew that in trying to act impartially he ran the risk of alienating the very people on whom he depended. He refused Wentworth’s request that he act for him in the libel suit, but suggested a compromise that involved Wentworth issuing a retraction and Judd dropping the suit. He wrote a letter for public use, declaring his utter confidence in Judd as “equally true and faithful” to himself and the party, but insistent that this be not deemed an endorsement of any particular candidate for the gubernatorial nomination, since all were his “good and true” friends. At the stickiest moment of the mayoral race, during his Cooper Union trip, he apparently telegraphed Judd, who then reluctantly agreed to campaign for Wentworth, bringing the
Tribune
with him: Wentworth won the election, and the libel suit was not pressed.
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Minimizing internal conflict had been the necessary precondition for Lincoln’s second goal: to secure his state party’s unanimous support at the national nominating convention and to prepare the ground for this without being seen openly to campaign. He knew he could rely on deep personal loyalty amongst the party’s otherwise mutually distrustful leaders. Wentworth overstated the case when he told Lincoln that the feuding leaders in Chicago were “all afraid of you,” but the mayor’s remark rightly intimated Lincoln’s natural authority. Though not a member of the state central committee himself, Lincoln had well-placed allies who were. They included not merely the chairman (Judd), but Fell as corresponding secretary. Disliking purely social functions, Lincoln still attended several gatherings that served to keep him mingling with politicians well placed to help him. Though a variety of leading national Republicans had their advocates in Illinois—notably Edward Bates and John McLean, who were valued for their appeal to conservative voters—increasingly Lincoln came to be seen, in the words of one editor, as the man “sure to consolidate the party vote of this state.” By late 1859 the signs of his interest in the nomination were evident, if still subtle and indirect, as in his telling Judd that “some of our friends . . . attach more consequence to getting the National convention into our State than I did, or do. Some of them made me promise to say so to you.”
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Judd’s success in January 1860 in persuading the Republican National Committee to locate the convention in Chicago encouraged the idea that Illinois should rally behind a single name. Soon in Springfield a private meeting of leaders friendly to Lincoln, including Judd and another state committeeman, Jackson Grimshaw, asked him to allow his name to go forward for the presidential nomination. With “characteristic modesty,” Grimshaw recalled, Lincoln said he doubted that he could succeed and asked for time to think. The next day he gave permission, but refused to let his name be used for the vice presidential slot. This was a canny move to ensure that his aides kept their sights on the highest prize. Lincoln was enough of a realist not to expect to win at Chicago, but he believed a solid personal vote from his home state would make him unstoppable for the Senate in 1864. As he explained to Judd, early in February, “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 delegates.”
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Lincoln welcomed the evidence of his growing support in January and February, including the editorial endorsement of Charles Ray and Joseph Medill, the owners of the
Chicago Press and Tribune.
However, it was his visit to the northeastern states that transformed his hopes. According to Herndon, he returned “as vigilant as he was ambitious.” He sidelined legal work and began “to trim his political sails.” At times he tied himself in verbal knots as he tried to excuse his ambition, but was frank with Lyman Trumbull: “The taste
is
in my mouth a little.” As in his pursuit of the Whig nomination in 1846, Lincoln contributed a special mix of untiring energy and discretion. Lacking an oiled political machine or the private funds with which to construct one, he fell back on his usual resources: his pen, employed in producing a stream of confidential and private letters to influential figures inside and outside the state; his feel for the pulse of Illinois politics; his shrewd reading of the broader picture; and his informal network of allies. Hugely important were those members of the state central committee—notably Fell, Judd, Grimshaw, and Herndon—who worked zealously to get as many pro-Lincoln delegates as possible elected to the state nominating convention at Decatur on May 9. Working with the statewide organization that they had been beefing up since the summer of 1859, and helped by the proliferation of local Republican and Lincoln clubs during early 1860, they looked to the county nominating conventions during March and April to endorse the hero of Cooper Union. Many did so, but Seward had his supporters in the northern districts, and Bates in the southern. The fact was that the central committee had no iron grip, and many county conventions of what was a decentralized party left it to their delegates to make up their minds at Decatur.
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