Team of Rivals (36 page)

He hoped to “penetrate the human soul” until, as he said, “all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior” could be discarded, until all Americans could “unite as one people throughout this land,” providing true meaning to the phrase “all men are created equal.” His comments on race here and throughout the debates reveal a brooding quality, as if he was thinking aloud, balancing a realistic appraisal of the present with a cautious eye toward progress in the future.

History demonstrates that Lincoln and his contemporaries were not overestimating the depth of racial bigotry in America. A century would pass before legal apartheid was outlawed in the South, before separate schools were deemed unconstitutional, before blacks were finally guaranteed the right to vote. Moreover, each of these steps toward what Frederick Douglass called the “practical recognition of our Equality” met with fierce white resistance and were made possible only by the struggles of blacks themselves, forcing the issue upon largely hostile or indifferent whites.

There is no way to penetrate Lincoln’s personal feelings about race. There is, however, the fact that armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of his life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part. Even more telling is the observation of Frederick Douglass, who would become a frequent public critic of Lincoln’s during his presidency, that of all the men he had met, Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” This remark takes on additional meaning when one realizes that Douglass had met dozens of celebrated abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Salmon Chase. Apparently, Douglass never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an “entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.”

T
HE SEVENTH AND LAST
debate took place at Alton, a town on the Mississippi River in southwest Illinois, before an audience Lincoln described as “having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on.” By the middle of the day, the “whole town” was “alive and stirring with large masses of human beings.” Gustave Koerner, a leader of the German-Americans, was among the throng that came to witness the show. “More than a thousand Douglas men,” Koerner wrote, “had chartered a boat to attend the Alton meeting,” while Lincoln “had come quietly down from Springfield with his wife that morning, unobserved…. He was soon surrounded by a crowd of Republicans; but there was no parade or fuss, while Douglas, about noon, made his pompous entry, and soon afterwards the boat from St. Louis landed at the wharf, heralded by the firing of guns and the strains of martial music.” When Koerner reached Lincoln’s hotel, he found him seated in the lobby. No sooner had they said hello than Lincoln suggested that they go together to “see Mary.” Apparently, Mary was “rather dispirited” about his chances for victory, and Lincoln hoped that Koerner would lift her mood. Koerner told Mary that he was “certain” the Republicans would carry the state in the popular vote, “and tolerably certain of our carrying the Legislature.”

Although there was little new in the Alton debate, Koerner believed that Lincoln’s speech included “some of the finest passages of all the speeches he ever made.” The “real issue,” Lincoln argued, the issue that would continue long after the “tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” was “the eternal struggle between…right and wrong”; the “common right of humanity” set against “the divine right of kings….

“It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” With this, Lincoln took his seat, Douglas made his concluding remarks, and the great debates came to an end.

In this race, as in all others, Lincoln was his own political manager. He drew up for his supporters a detailed battle plan, examining every district in the state and listing those he regarded as lost, those “we take to ourselves,” and those “to be struggled for.” Between his speeches, he drafted letters of instruction to key supporters, telling Koerner, for example, “We are in great danger in Madison. It is said half the Americans are going for Douglas…. Nothing must be left undone. Elsewhere things look reasonably well. Please write me.”

Though Eastern Republicans stayed out of the race, Chase came to Illinois to stump for the Republican ticket. He believed that Lincoln was a man who could be trusted on the antislavery issue, while at the same time he recognized that the prairie lawyer could be helpful to him in the upcoming presidential convention. More clearly than Seward or Greeley, Chase saw from the start that Douglas would never truly stand with the antislavery forces. For eight days, traveling to Chicago, Galena, Warren, Rockford, and Mendota, Chase spoke to thousands on behalf of Lincoln and the Republican ticket in Illinois—a gesture Lincoln would not forget.

It was a dreary day, November 2, 1858, when the voters of Illinois went to the polls. The names of Lincoln and Douglas did not appear on the ballots, since the state legislature would choose the next senator. That evening, Lincoln anxiously awaited the returns with his friends in the telegraph office. Once again, he would be sorely disappointed. Though the Republicans had won the popular vote, the Democrats had retained control of the state legislature, thereby ensuring Douglas’s reelection. Lincoln’s supporters were disconsolate and angry, blaming an unfair apportionment scheme. Koerner charged that “by the gerrymandering the State seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one thousand Republican votes.” Republicans in Illinois bewailed the lack of support from Eastern Republicans and bitterly resented a last-minute intervention by the respected Whig leader and Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who had penned a series of highly publicized letters to Illinois, urging old Whigs and American supporters to vote for Douglas to repay his Lecompton stance. “Thousands of Whigs dropped us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden,” Herndon complained.

Two days later, still feeling the sting of his defeat, Lincoln wrote Crittenden. He suppressed his justifiable resentment, exhibiting as he had with Greeley, and earlier with Trumbull and Judd, a magnanimity rare in the world of politics. “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me,” he told Crittenden, “but, even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything dishonorable.”

Yet this defeat left Lincoln far less disheartened than his loss four years earlier. He had won the vote of the people. The ambition he had outlined in his very first public address at the age of twenty-three—to render himself worthy of his fellow citizens’ esteem—had been realized.

“I am glad I made the late race,” he wrote his Springfield friend Dr. Anson Henry on November 19. “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way…. I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” That cause, he vowed to Henry Ashbury, “must not be surrendered at the end of
one,
or even, one
hundred
defeats.” There was no reason for despondency, he told another friend, Dr. Charles Ray, who continued to brood over Lincoln’s defeat. “You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.”

A
S
1859
OPENED,
Lincoln remained guardedly optimistic about the future, knowing he had run a solid campaign for the Senate and made a good name for himself. Well aware that he had only an outside chance at the presidential nomination in 1860, he nevertheless worked to build his reputation nationally. He was always careful to conceal his ambitions. Whenever he was asked about the upcoming election, he would speak with well-modulated enthusiasm of other candidates. Yet all his actions were consistent with a cautious and politically skillful pursuit of the nomination. Indeed, no other period in his pre-presidential life better illustrates his consummate abilities as a politician.

Unlike Seward, he had no experienced political manager to guide his efforts. He would have to rely on himself, as he had from his early days on the frontier and throughout his career as shopkeeper, lawyer, and politician. A month earlier, Jesse Fell, secretary of the Illinois Republican state central committee, had expressed his “decided impression” in a letter to Lincoln that Lincoln’s tremendous fight against Douglas had given him a national platform. If the details of his early life and his “efforts on the slavery question” could be “sufficiently brought before the people,” he could be made “a formidable, if not a successful candidate for the presidency.” Skeptical, Lincoln noted that Seward and Chase and others were “so much better known.” With an equivocal modesty, he asked: “Is it not, as a matter of justice, due to such men, who have carried this movement forward to its present status, in spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard names? I really think so.” As for a campaign biography, he curtly answered, “there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else.”

Although refusing to confuse flattery with fact, he recognized nonetheless that Fell’s argument had force. Lincoln’s gradually evolving political strategy began with an awareness that while each of his three rivals had first claim on a substantial number of delegates, if he could position himself as the second choice of those who supported each of the others, he might pick up votes if one or another of the top candidates faltered.

As a dark horse, he knew it was important not to reveal his intentions too early, so as to minimize the possibility of opponents mobilizing against him. On April 16, 1859, when the Republican editor of the
Rock Island Register
proposed to call on other editors to make “a simultaneous announcement of your name for the Presidency,” Lincoln replied: “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.” He added that he “must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.” By “fit,” the self-confident Lincoln meant only to suggest that he did not necessarily have the credentials or experience appropriate to the office, not that he lacked the ability. It was important that any efforts on his behalf be squelched until the timing was right. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.

W
HILE
L
INCOLN MOVED CAREFULLY,
step by step, Seward, Chase, and even Bates had grown so eager for the presidential nomination that they made a number of costly errors as they headed down the final stretch.

In the crucial months before the nomination, Seward, at Weed’s rare misguided suggestion, took an extended tour of Europe. Certain that Seward had the nomination locked up so long as he refrained from the radical statements that frightened more moderate elements of the party, Weed recommended that his protégé remove himself from the increasingly contentious debate at home by traveling overseas for eight months. “All our discreet friends unite in sending me out of the country to spend the recess of Congress,” Seward joked.

Fourteen-year-old Fanny Seward, at home with her mother, was desolate at the prospect of an eight-month separation from her father. In the days before his ship was set to sail from New York, she could think of nothing else, she confided in her diary, but his approaching departure. An intelligent, plain girl, Fanny had been encouraged from an early age to read broadly and to write. Beyond her daily journal, she tried her hand at poetry and plays, determined, she once vowed, never to marry, so that she could live at home and devote herself to a literary career. While extremely close to her mother, a relationship she described as “‘my affinity’ with whom I
think
instead of speak,” she idolized her father. The night before he left for Europe, she could barely contain her tears.

In Europe, Seward was entertained by politicians and royalty alike, who assumed that he would be the next president. He met with Queen Victoria, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, King Leopold I of Belgium, and Pope Pius IX. Moving from one dazzling social occasion to the next, Seward was ebullient. His letters home revealed the great pleasure he took in his sojourn, which carried him to Egypt and the Holy Land. Yet in the countdown to the presidential nomination, eight months was a critical absence.

Upon his return to Washington for the new congressional session that began after the New Year in 1860, Seward took Weed’s advice and prepared a major address. Designed to reassure Northern conservatives and moderate Southerners that he was a man who could be trusted to hold the Union together, the speech was to be delivered on the Senate floor on February 29, 1860. The reporter Henry Stanton later recalled that Seward showed it to him beforehand and asked him to write it up for the
New York Tribune,
with an accompanying description of the scene in the Senate chamber as he was speaking. “The description was elaborate,” Stanton claimed, “the Senator himself suggesting some of the nicer touches, and every line of it was written and on its way to New York before Mr. Seward had uttered a word in the Senate Chamber.” Seward was in “buoyant spirits,” assuring Stanton that with this speech they would “go down to posterity together.”

Frances Seward was less enthusiastic, perhaps fearing that her husband would bend too far to placate the moderates. “I wish it were over,” she told her son Will on the morning of the speech. Fanny, however, seated in the gallery directly opposite her father, was thrilled to witness the great event. “The whole house of Reps were there,” she gushed, “the galleries soon filled, alike with those of North and South, ladies and gentlemen, even the doorways were filled.” When the three-hour speech started, Fanny recorded, “no Republican member left his seat…the house was very still.” Everyone understood that this speech could influence the Republican nomination.

Seward took as his theme the enduring quality of the national compact. Though he maintained his principled opposition to slavery, he softened his tone, referring to the slave states as “capital States,” while the free states became the “labor States.” His language remained tranquil throughout, with no trace of the inflammatory phrases that had characterized his great speeches in the past. It seemed, one historian observed, that “‘the irrepressible conflict’ between slavery and freedom had graciously given way to the somewhat repressible conflict of the political aspirants.”

Departing from the bold assertions of his Rochester speech, Seward now claimed that “differences of opinion, even on the subject of slavery, with us are political, not social or personal differences. There is not one disunionist or disloyalist among us all…. We have never been more patient, and never loved the representatives of other sections more, than now…. The people of the North are not enemies but friends and brethren of the South, faithful and true as in the days when death has dealt his arrows promiscuously among them on the common battle-fields of freedom.”

The Republican Party in the North, he pledged, did not “seek to force, or even to intrude, our system” upon the South. “You are sovereign on the subject of slavery within your own borders.” The debate revolved only around the expansion of slavery in new and future states. Retreating from the larger vision of the nation’s future manifest destiny in some of his earlier speeches, he promised that Republicans did not harbor any ulterior motive “to introduce negro equality” in the nation at large.

Seward’s powerful conclusion—an altered form of which would appear in Lincoln’s inaugural address—was an impassioned testimony to the Union. The nation could never be sundered, for its bonds were not simply “the written compact,” or even the radiating network of roads, train tracks, trade routes, and telegraph lines that facilitated “commerce and social intercourse.” Rather, Seward urged his audience to conceive of the strongest bonds holding the Union together as “the millions of fibers of millions of contented, happy human hearts,” linked by affection and hope to their democratic government, “the first, the last, and the only such one that has ever existed, which takes equal heed always of their wants.”

The speech produced deafening applause in the galleries and widespread praise in the press. Reprinted in pamphlet form, more than half a million copies were circulated throughout the country. Some, of course, considered Seward’s tone too conciliatory, lacking the principle and fire of his previous addresses. That speech
“killed Seward with me forever,”
the abolitionist Cassius Clay reportedly said. Charles Sumner wrote to a friend that “as an intellectual effort,” Seward’s oration was “most eminent,” but that there was “one passage”—perhaps the one disclaiming any intention to support black equality—which he “regretted, & [Seward’s] wife agrees with me.”

Nevertheless, Seward’s goal had not been to rally the faithful but to disarm the opposition and placate uneasy moderates. “From the stand-point of Radical Abolitionism, it would be very easy to criticize,” Frederick Douglass observed in his monthly paper, but “it is a masterly and triumphant effort. It will reassure the timid wing of his party, which has been rendered a little nervous by recent clamors against him, by its coolness of temper and conservatism of manner…. We think that Mr. Seward’s prospects for the Chicago nomination will be essentially brightened by the wide circulation of this speech.” Seward, he concluded, was “the ablest man of his party,” and “as a matter of party justice,” he deserved the nomination.

“I hear of ultra old Whigs in Boston who say they are ready to take up Mr. Seward upon his recent speech,” a Massachusetts delegate told Weed. “All the New England delegates, save Connecticut’s, will be equally satisfactory.” And in Ohio, Salmon Chase admitted that there “seems to be at present a considerable set toward Seward.” Seward himself believed that the speech had been a great success, the final step in his long journey to the presidency.

In the heady weeks that followed, Weed assured him that everything was in readiness for a victory at the convention. By trading legislative charters to build city railroads for campaign contributions, Weed had assembled what one observer called “oceans of money,” a campaign chest worth several hundred thousand dollars.

As the convention approached, overconfidence reigned in the Seward camp and poor judgment set in. Despite Weed’s generally keen political intuition, he failed to anticipate the damage Seward would suffer as a consequence of a rift with Horace Greeley. Over the years, Greeley had voiced a longing for political office, for both the monetary compensation it would provide and the prestige it promised. On several occasions, Greeley later claimed, he had made this desire clear to Seward and Weed. They never took his political aspirations seriously, believing that his strength and usefulness lay in writing, not in practical politics and public office. Greeley had written a plaintive letter to Seward in the autumn of 1854, in which he catalogued a long list of grievances and announced the dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed, & Greeley. He recalled the work he had done to secure Seward’s first victory as governor, only to discover that jobs had been dispensed “worth $3000 to $20,000 per year to your friends and compatriots, and I returned to my garret and my crust, and my desperate battle with pecuniary obligations.” With the exception of a single term in Congress, Greeley charged, Weed had never given him a chance to be nominated for any office. Despite hundreds of suggestions that he run for governor in the most recent election, Weed had refused to support the possibility, claiming that his candidacy would hurt Seward’s chances for the Senate. But the most humiliating moment had come, Greeley revealed, when Weed handed the nomination for lieutenant governor that year to Henry Raymond, editor of the
New York Times,
the
Tribune
’s archrival.

Seward was distressed to read Greeley’s letter, which he characterized as “full of sharp, pricking thorns,” but he mistakenly assumed that Greeley’s pique was temporary, akin to the anger, he said, that one of his sons might display if denied the chance to go to the circus or a dancing party. After showing it to his wife, Seward cast the letter aside. Frances read it more accurately. Recognizing the “mortal offense” Greeley had taken, she saved the letter, preserving a record of the tangled web of emotions that led Greeley in 1860 to abandon one of his oldest friends in favor of Edward Bates, a man he barely knew.

Week after week, through his columns in the
Tribune,
Greeley laid the groundwork for the nomination of Bates. Seward’s supporters were incensed when he subtly began to sabotage the New Yorker’s campaign. Henry Raymond remarked that Greeley “insinuated, rather than openly uttered, exaggerations of local prejudice and animosity against him; hints that parties and men hostile to him and to the Republican organization must be conciliated and their support secured; and a new-born zeal for nationalizing the party by consulting the slave-holding states in regard to the nomination.” The influence of the
Tribune
was substantial, and with each passing day, enthusiasm for Bates’s candidacy grew.