Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (24 page)

The pizin crew who oppose us tell us to come to ABRAHAM’s buzzum, when the fact is he hain’t got no more buzzum than a chest of jiner’s tools has. . . . Maybe he’s a good man. I’m not here to maline him, my Brethering. No doubt he kin split a fair rail. Probly he’s a kind man in his family & pays his grocer’s bill promptly, but my Brethering, he can’t keep a hotel. He’s too small a man—too weak a sister—to be President.
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An anti-Republican cartoon in which Lincoln, carried on a fence rail by Horace Greeley, encourages a troupe of radical reformers and eccentrics as they advance on a lunatic asylum. Advocates of women’s rights, free love, and socialism bring in their tow a cluster of feckless, thieving hooligans. A Mormon says, “I want religion abolished and the book of Mormon made the standard of morality.” A black dandy declares, “De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect. I want dat understood.” Lincoln tells them: “Now my friends I’m almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted.”

The October state elections triumphantly vindicated the Republicans’ campaign strategy of targeting the swing voters in the pivotal states. Ohio gave the party ticket a majority of 12,000. More encouraging still, Lane in Indiana and Curtin in Pennsylvania swept to their governor’s mansions by stunning margins of 10,000 and 32,000 respectively. The two men who had done most to block Seward at Chicago now appeared to remove the final obstacles to a Lincoln presidency, by drawing into the coalition enough nativists, old-line Whigs, and immigrants to ensure that in November the Constitutional Union ticket would enjoy little credibility amongst conservative anti-Democrats. Lincoln told Seward that the results exceeded his highest hopes: “It now really looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands.”
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Douglas grimly concurred and abandoned the stump in the western states. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President. We must try to save the Union. I will go South.”
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In this Republican print,
the election takes on the character of a baseball game. A victorious Lincoln, his foot on “home base,” wears a “Wide Awake Club” belt and explains to his opponents the
merits of a “good bat,” namely
a wooden rail inscribed “Equal Rights and Free Territory.” His defeated (“skunk’d”) rivals—Bell,
Douglas, and Breckinridge—
carry bats which say, respectively, “Fusion,” “Non Intervention,” and “Slavery Extension.”

Not even attempts at cooperation amongst his opponents would deny him the election. The leaders of the Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell forces in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, fearing that a Republican victory would provoke the secession of southern states and so strike a commercial body blow at New York, Philadelphia, and their hinterlands, tried to agree on “fusion” tickets, but with only limited success. Continuing recriminations between the “treacherous” Douglasites and “secessionist” Breckinridge men did little to restore a pragmatic unity to the fragmented Democratic party. At the same time, the Irish and other foreign-born Democrats could not easily forget the nativist antecedents of the Constitutional Union party (and, in case they were inclined to do so, Republican editors were only too ready to issue helpful reminders). Fusion of a limited kind was engineered in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; in New York, despite more effective cooperation, Lincoln still ran comfortably ahead.

As this suggests, Lincoln’s victory on November 6 was not in any simple way the consequence of a divided opposition, though that is what the tally of presidential ballots might seem to indicate, for Lincoln won with less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationally: 1,866,452 to Douglas’s 1,376,957, Breckinridge’s 849,781, and Bell’s 588,879. This, however, offers a misleading measure of Lincoln’s relative strength. More telling was his comfortable victory in the electoral college, by 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72, Bell’s 39, and Douglas’s 12. This he achieved by securing a clear majority of the vote in almost every free state in which he ran. In New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, and other populous states with the largest number of presidential electors, support for Lincoln exceeded the combined popular vote for his opponents. Only in California, Oregon, and New Jersey did his ticket win electoral votes with fewer than 50 percent of ballots cast, and these electors (14 in all) were not crucial to the outcome. Thus, even if we combine all the opposition ballots behind a single candidate, state by state, Lincoln still retains his ascendancy in the electoral college, by 169 to 134.

Hypothesizing a united opposition vote, however, is entirely unhistorical. For Republicans to have faced a united Democratic opposition, as they had done in 1856, either the Douglas or the Buchanan forces would have had to concede their position. This was implausible in the circumstances of 1860, given the split over Lecompton, Douglas’s political realism, and the tightening grip of pro-slavery extremism in the southern party. Had—against all likelihood—a Democratic compromise been patched together, the party would have lost the support of free-soil elements in the North, or southern rights men in the South, or both. Douglas undoubtedly retained the votes of some northern antislavery Democrats precisely because he was seen to be untainted by connection with the “doughface” administration. In other words, the divided opposition—given how things had come to stand by 1860—may have maximized the anti-Lincoln vote, rather than making the Republicans’ victory more likely. (The divisions
may
have helped Lincoln, however, in the October state elections, especially in Indiana, where personal antipathies ran so deep that many Breckinridge men actually sustained the Republicans against the forces of the hated Douglas.)

More significant than the Democrats’ schism in paving the way for Lincoln’s victory was his party’s success in squeezing the conservative American vote of 1856. Compared with Fillmore, Bell performed miserably in the free states. In the crucial southern regions of Indiana he held onto just one vote in five, in southern Illinois just one in eight. Here Lincoln doubled—at least—Frémont’s share of the vote. As early as June a hopeful Herndon had sensed that in the western states “the ‘old line Whigs’ are fast coming out for us—are going almost unanimously and wildly for Lincoln.”
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In the end a combination of a relatively moderate platform and the candidate’s lawyerly Whig constitutionalism and southern roots helped to assuage conservatives’ fears of Republican radicalism. Symbolically, the party won in Springfield itself, reversing the Democrats’ victory of 1858, and in Sangamon County, Douglas’s majority was now reduced to just a few votes.
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The Republican heartlands remained, as they had been for Frémont, not the conservative lower North, but the countryside and the small towns in regions most saturated with New England influences. With only a few exceptions—Chicago was one—Lincoln ran poorly in the largest cities: leading businessmen, including those with southern trading connections, were commonly hostile, as were unskilled and poorer foreign-born workers. It was amongst skilled workingmen and market-oriented farmers that Republicans did best. The Massachusetts
Springfield Republican
located the party’s strength in “the great middling-interest class,” men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom.” The party of “free soil, free labor and free men” struck a powerful chord with certain economic interests in the free states.
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Yet the Republican appeal related less to voters’ immediate material interests than to their attachment to ideas of self-improvement, achievement through self-discipline, and economic independence.

These ideas commonly derived their moral aspect from religious authority. It is clear that Republican voting patterns related quite strongly to religious and church affiliations and to the ethnic identities with which they were interwoven. Veteran reformers as well as youthful idealists rallied to the party and to Lincoln as incorruptible representatives of a particular variety of ramrod-backed, reforming Protestantism. There is little doubt they enjoyed the support of the smaller, earnestly antislavery denominations, including Quakers, Freewill Baptists, Wesleyan Methodists, and Free Presbyterians. But how successful were Republicans in living up to their self-image as the “Christian party” by securing the votes of the bulk of the free states’ evangelical churchgoers?

Lincoln’s own analysis provides a proper caution against the notion of Protestant political uniformity. During the campaign, in a conversation with Newton Bateman—the superintendent of public instruction for Illinois, whose room in the state capitol adjoined Lincoln’s own campaign headquarters—he produced the results of a recent canvass of Springfield voters. These included the names of the city’s clergymen. Bateman recalled Lincoln’s frustration that self-proclaimed God-fearing men could so have misread their Bibles as not to care whether slavery was voted up or down: “Here are twenty-three ministers of different denominations, and all of them are against me but three; and here are a great many prominent members of the churches, a very large majority of whom are against me.”
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As we have seen, Lincoln had a strong grasp of the religious features of his state’s electoral geography and political cultures, and of Springfield’s standing at the crossroads between Yankee reformism and southern-oriented conservatism. Against the predominant Democrat and Constitutional Union clergy stood a minority of New Englanders, including two Connecticut-born pastors: Albert Hale, of the antislavery Second Presbyterian Church, and Noyes W. Miner, Lincoln’s Baptist neighbor, who would spend election day in 1860 at the polls, doing “the hardest day’s work he ever did challenging votes and trying to keep things straight.”
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Lincoln’s words did not mean that he considered Republicanism uniformly weak within Illinois evangelical Protestant churches. The party was particularly well supported by New School (though not Old School) Presbyterianism as well as by most of the state’s two hundred Congregational churches.
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Equally significant was the considerable loyalty to Lincoln, especially in the northern counties, amongst the state’s largest denomination, the Methodists. The editor of the Northwest’s most influential Methodist newspaper, Thomas M. Eddy, was a staunch Republican. When, during the course of the campaign, Anthony Bewley, a northern Methodist preacher, was lynched by a Texas mob, Eddy took up the case as the most recent instance of the slave power’s flagrant violation of Americans’ constitutional rights. In an open letter to President Buchanan, he pointedly noted that this southern “reign of terror” drove Methodists to ask: “Can an administration be found which will protect the rights of conscience and the freedom of worship?” Though previously divided in their voting habits, Methodists would cast their “united suffrage” for the man able to uphold their rights. Eddy’s threat caused no small stir. His thinly veiled endorsement of Lincoln was reprinted in the columns of the
Chicago Press and Tribune
(where the Methodist Scripps proved a bridge to his denomination) and other Republican papers throughout the free states.
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Even in central Illinois, where they were relatively weak, Methodist Republicans made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers. Leonard F. Smith, for instance, a young, Canadian-born itinerant preacher, experienced on August 8 one of the most memorable days in his life: rising at 3:00 a.m., he and a fellow Methodist had traveled from beyond Jacksonville by horse-drawn wagon and railroad to attend the great Lincoln ratification meeting in Springfield; stunned by the numbers, he marveled at the color and pageantry, especially the torchlight procession of two thousand Wide Awakes, and eventually arrived back home after five the following morning fortified in his political creed. Though his senior fellow ministers included Peter Cartwright, “old Father Gillham,” and other southern-born Democrats, Smith resolutely attended Republican rallies, barbecues, and pole-raisings, firm in his conviction that to work for Lincoln’s victory over a party “characterized by a noisy dirty ignorant rabble” was a proper expression of his religious faith.
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