Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (19 page)

Republicans bustled into the small central Illinois town for the two-day state convention just a week before the national gathering in Chicago. Six hundred delegates and over two thousand spectators crammed into a specially constructed timber and canvas “wigwam.” Though Lincoln was known to enjoy broad support for the presidential nomination, as the state’s “favourite son,” there was still no certainty that delegates would be formally instructed to support him at Chicago. Then came a piece of transforming political theater. A brilliant initiative of Richard Oglesby, a young Decatur lawyer-politician, turned Lincoln into the apotheosis of the self-made frontiersman, the horny-handed representative of democratic free labor in the struggle against aristocracy and a frozen social order. During a pause in the proceedings, Oglesby teasingly announced the presence of “a distinguished citizen of Illinois” and moved that he be invited to the stand. Lincoln was unobserved just inside the entrance. Oglesby named him, to a storm of applause. Then, according to a witness, Lincoln “was ‘boosted’ up until he found himself, kicking scrambling—crawling—upon the sea of heads between him and the Stand.” As he blushingly took his place on the stage “Hats were thrown up . . . as if hats were no longer useful.”
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Building the drama through dialogue with the audience, Oglesby explained that an “Old Democrat” of Macon County had something to present. “Receive it,” cried the crowd. Then Lincoln’s cousin John Hanks made his way to the stand carrying two decorated wooden fence rails, serving as support poles for a banner which read: “Abraham Lincoln. The Rail Candidate for President in 1860. Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by Thos. Hanks and Abe Lincoln—whose father was the first pioneer in Macon County.” Deafening enthusiasm gave way to calls for a speech. Lincoln, who “seemed to shake with inward laughter,” briefly obliged. He confirmed that he had indeed split rails and built a log cabin near Decatur on first arriving in the state thirty years earlier. Whether or not these were from that site he could not confirm, but he added, in a happy turn of phrase anticipating the modern sound bite, that “he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.”
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At a stroke, Lincoln became “the rail splitter.” It was a powerful image, matching the most potent symbols of previous presidential campaigns. As “Old Hickory” provided a shorthand for Andrew Jackson’s iron will and resolve, and as “Old Tip” and “Old Rough and Ready” connected William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor with the sturdy nationalism of westward advance and conquest, so the Decatur label made Lincoln the embodiment of the enterprising, socially mobile western laborer. Whether by a stroke of genius or of luck, Oglesby’s initiative was brilliantly successful, laying the foundations for a mythic Lincoln that made much more of where he had begun life than where he had ended up. One of those swept along by what appeared to be a spontaneous moment of drama later recognized the calculation behind it. “I began to think I could smell a very large mouse—and this whole thing was a cunningly devised thing of knowing ones, to make Mr. Lincoln President, and that banner was to be the ‘Battle flag,’ in the coming contest between ‘labor free’ and ‘labor slave,’ between democracy and aristocracy.”
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The startling show of enthusiasm for Lincoln led his advisers to discuss their next move. They knew that Seward had considerable support amongst the state’s delegates to the national convention; Leonard Swett judged that eight of the twenty-two would “gladly” have supported the New Yorker. As first business on the second day John M. Palmer proffered a resolution that instructed the Illinois delegation “to use all honorable means” to secure Lincoln’s nomination at Chicago, “and to vote as a unit for him.” He followed with a speech that neutralized the objections of Sewardites from the northern districts, and the motion passed unanimously. Significantly, the convention offered no second preference for president, to avoid any suggestion that they expected Lincoln to fall at an early hurdle in Chicago. Thanks to his managers and their influence over the party machine, Lincoln had achieved his initial objective: a state party united behind his candidacy.
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THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION

Republicans had a spring in their step as they set out for Chicago. The party had broadened its electoral base since 1856, with something close to an administration rout in the elections of 1858 being followed by further Democratic losses a year later. The Republicans’ increased representation in Washington and the statehouses reflected both their tighter grip in areas where they were already strong—New England and the upper North—and their advances in the Democratic heartlands further south, including Pennsylvania, where a predominantly Republican coalition, the People’s party, had taken control of the legislature. Victory in 1860, the party’s leaders well understood, would be theirs if only they could maintain their momentum in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and New Jersey, the free states beyond Frémont’s grasp in 1856. The first two of these would hold their state elections in October; good results there would provide a springboard for the subsequent presidential ballot.

Republicans drew further cheer from more immediate political developments, as the Democrats, meeting in April at their own convention in Charleston, appeared to take a large stride toward self-destruction. The capital of secessionism was not a propitious venue in which to apply balm to the wounds, still raw, inflicted by the Douglas-Buchanan quarrel. Battle lines were drawn over the party’s platform, with the southern-rights men demanding federal protection of slavery in the territories, and Douglasites standing by popular sovereignty and the rulings of the Supreme Court. Their version of the platform rejected, William L. Yancey of Alabama and several other delegates from the Deep South withdrew. Unable to agree on a presidential candidate, the convention adjourned on May 3.

Republican strategists were determined to guard against complacency. Few considered their opponents a spent force, even after Charleston. If, as Edward Pierce believed, “[t]here was a fair chance . . . that the Democrats would rally and unite,” then Douglas would be the likely leader.
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If, on the other hand, the party remained split, Douglas would certainly be a candidate, and his divorce from southern radicals would strengthen him with northern voters. Either way, Republicans needed a presidential candidate who would not be politically dwarfed by comparisons with the Little Giant. The party also had to have confidence that its presidential nominee could win in every one of the battleground, or “doubtful,” states. This was a need made all the more pertinent by the banding together in Baltimore, just a week before the Chicago convention, of the residual elements of old-line Whiggery and the American party. Calling themselves the Constitutional Union party, and standing on a general Unionist platform, they nominated the border-state politician John Bell as president and the urbane Edward Everett of Massachusetts as his running mate. Their full vote-pulling power remained an imponderable, but their special appeal would undoubtedly lie with those conservative voters in the lower North—the southernmost tier of free states—who had held out against Frémont in 1856.

Lincoln was just one of a clutch of possible nominees whose names decorated editorial columns on the eve of the convention. A double-page lithograph in
Harper’s
Weekly
carried Brady’s portrait of him, along with representations of ten other hopefuls. Seward took pride of place, as befitted his national standing and status as the party’s front-runner. In recent months the senator from New York had worked hard to strengthen his chances by softening his reputation for radicalism. In earlier speeches he had used phrases which (in the case of “the higher law”) seemed to put the promptings of conscience before constitutional obligation and which (when he was discussing “the irrepressible conflict”) seemed to invite a violent, frontal assault on the South. In fact, Seward was no ideologue; rather, he and his skillful manager, Thurlow Weed, were supremely practical politicians. To reassure the moderate center of the party, he spoke in the Senate at the end of February, disavowing sectionalism, breathing an emollient Unionism, and repudiating John Brown. But party strategists remained unclear about Seward’s ability to capture the battleground states of the lower North, an uncertainty reinforced by the strength there of former Know-Nothings: nativists had not stopped castigating Seward as the traitor to Protestantism who, as governor of New York, had supported Roman Catholics’ campaign for a share of public funds for their parochial schools. A further question mark hung over how far Seward would be damaged by his association with Weed’s notorious political machine.
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Seward’s perceived weaknesses gave grounds for hope to his chief rivals, most notably Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, John McLean, and Simon Cameron. Yet each of these was open to equally powerful objections. Chase’s position on the Fugitive Slave Law made him even more of a radical than Seward, with all that that implied for contesting the battleground states. Nor was he helped by his reputation as a free-trader and a friend of the foreign-born. Openly too ambitious for his own good, he lacked an organization and overestimated his support, which was not solid even in his own state of Ohio. Bates, a cultured, conservative former Whig lawyer from the slave state of Missouri, enjoyed the backing of Greeley’s
Tribune
and of several tacticians in the lower North, where it was thought he could swing the vote. But he was less benefited by his dependable Unionism than he was weakened by his open identification with nativism, his accommodation to the slaveholding institutions amongst which he had always lived, and his very belated conversion to the Republicans. A western leader caustically remarked, “I go in for electing; but why go in to the bowels of Niggerdom for a candidate?”
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Justice McLean of the United States Supreme Court was a more attractive proposition: although a conservative, he had been seriously considered for the Republican presidential nomination in 1856 and had since issued a dissenting judgment in the
Dred Scott
case. His chances in the “doubtful” states were good. But because he was seventy-five, his age became a persisting concern: “I will not go into the cemetery or catacomb,” Fitz-Henry Warren, an Iowa Republican, declared. “The candidate must be alive and able to walk at least from the parlor into the dining room.”
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Cameron’s strength derived from his connections as a U.S. senator and a wealthy political boss in a strategically critical state, Pennsylvania. However, his reputation for corruption and lack of scruple, and his doubtful pedigree as a former Democrat and Know-Nothing, blighted his appeal and prevented his building significant support outside his home state.
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By contrast with these better-known aspirants, Lincoln looked far less likely to antagonize the party’s critical interest groups. There was enough in his brand of moderate Republicanism to accommodate the aspirations and concerns of a broad range of opinion. Conservative Republicans took heart from his loyalty to the values of Clayite Whiggery, his reverence for the Union, his constitutional respect for the Fugitive Slave Law and southerners’ property rights, his disavowal of higher-law doctrine, and his avoidance of the moral strictures on southern sinfulness which characterized so much abolitionist rhetoric. Yet Lincoln was also well placed to reach out to the more radical elements in his party, several of whom, including Giddings, had confidence in him. His House Divided speech and later speeches told of resolution in confronting the slave power, ending the spread of slavery, and eventually choking it to death. Though not ready to use federal power to attack slavery directly, preferring instead to wait on events, he—as the historian Eric Foner has noted—“shared the radicals’ sublime confidence that they were on the side of history.”
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Like them, he spoke a language of moral revulsion and, along with other moderates, ensured that in 1860 the party found its center of gravity closer to the radical than the conservative position.

Equally, Lincoln had cleverly positioned himself to be acceptable to both the foreign-born and the nativists. Convinced that principle and pragmatism demanded the party embrace the sizable immigrant population of the Northwest, especially the German-Americans, Lincoln had joined in 1859 with Gustave Koerner, Norman Judd, and other leading Illinois Republicans to repudiate the Massachusetts naturalization law. Notably, he wrote to Theodore Canisius, the publisher of the
Illinois Staats-Anzeiger:
“Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the
elevation
of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to
degrade
them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of
white men,
even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.” Shortly afterward, when the
Staats-Anzeiger
was about to fold, Lincoln secretly bought it, leaving Canisius as the contracted editor provided he championed the Republicans.
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By the eve of the Chicago convention, Lincoln enjoyed the support of a range of German-American leaders, both within and beyond Illinois. Unlike Seward, however, he had not earned the enmity of the nativists. He had taken care, at the height of Know-Nothing fervor in the mid-1850s, not to lambaste them publicly, keeping his criticisms private.

Lincoln offered the party a useful blend of freshness and proven ability. He had reputation enough to be known as a highly effective opponent of Douglas and popular sovereignty, but his relative unfamiliarity on the national stage would allow campaign image-makers to fashion him into a Republican “type”—a westerner, rail splitter, and incorruptible man of the people. His lack of experience in national and executive office counted for less than his record of electoral success. As the various summaries of his life stressed, he had never been “beaten by the people” since his one and only defeat, as a candidate for the state legislature in 1832; only self-sacrificial magnanimity had thwarted his Senate bid in 1855, as had unequal electoral apportionment in 1858.
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