Team of Rivals (43 page)

The tumult in Springfield that evening was recorded by a young journalist, John Hay, who would later become Lincoln’s aide. He reported that “the hearty western populace burst forth in the wildest manifestations of joy…Lincoln banners, decked in every style of rude splendor, fluttered in the high west wind.” The church bells tolled. Thousands assembled in the rotunda of the Capitol for a festive celebration replete with victory speeches. When the meeting adjourned, the happy throngs converged on Lincoln’s house. His appearance at the door was “the signal for immense cheering.” Modestly, Lincoln insisted that “he did not suppose the honor of such a visit was intended particularly for himself as a private citizen but rather as the representative to a great party.”

F
OR GENERATIONS,
people have weighed and debated the factors that led to Lincoln’s surprising victory. Many have agreed with the verdict of Murat Halstead, who wrote that “the fact of the Convention was the defeat of Seward rather than the nomination of Lincoln.” Seward himself seemed to accept this analysis. When asked years later why Lincoln had won, he said: “The leader of a political party in a country like ours is so exposed that his enemies become as numerous and formidable as his friends.” Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, “comparatively unknown, had not to contend with the animosities generally marshaled against a leader.”

There is truth to this argument, but it tells only part of the story, for the question remains: why was Lincoln the beneficiary of Seward’s downfall rather than Chase or Bates?

Some have pointed to luck, to the fact that Lincoln lived in a battleground state the Republicans needed to win, and to the fact that the convention was held in Chicago, where the strength of local support could add weight to his candidacy. “Had the Convention been held at any other place,” Koerner admitted, “Lincoln would not have been nominated.”

Others have argued that he was positioned perfectly in the center of the party. He was less radical than Seward or Chase, but less conservative than Bates. He was less offensive than Seward to the Know Nothings, but more acceptable than Bates to the German-Americans.

Still others have argued that Lincoln’s team in Chicago played the game better than anyone else, conceiving the best strategy and cleverly using the leverage of promises to the best advantage. Without doubt, the Lincoln men, under the skillful leadership of David Davis, performed brilliantly.

Chance, positioning, and managerial strategy—all played a role in Lincoln’s victory. Still, if we consider the comparative resources each contender brought to the race—their range of political skills, their emotional, intellectual, and moral qualities, their rhetorical abilities, and their determination and willingness to work hard—it is clear that when opportunity beckoned, Lincoln was the best prepared to answer the call. His nomination, finally, was the result of his character and his life experiences—these separated him from his rivals and provided him with advantages unrecognized at the time.

Having risen to power with fewer privileges than any of his rivals, Lincoln was more accustomed to rely upon himself to shape events. From beginning to end, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination. While Seward, at Weed’s suggestion, spent eight months wandering Europe and the Middle East to escape dissension at home, Lincoln earned the goodwill and respect of tens of thousands with a strenuous speaking tour that left a positive imprint on Republicans in five crucial Midwestern states. While Chase unwisely declined his invitation to speak at the lecture series in New York at Cooper Union, Lincoln accepted with alacrity, recognizing the critical importance of making a good impression in Seward’s home territory. In addition, Chase refused invitations to travel to New England and shore up his support. Ironically, despite repeated pledges in his diary to do anything necessary to achieve honor and fame, Chase showed a lack of resolution in the final weeks before the convention.

When ardent Republicans heard Lincoln speak, they knew that if their beloved Seward could not win, they had in the eloquent orator from Illinois a man of considerable capacity whom they could trust, one who would hold fast on the central issue that had forged the party—the fight against extending slavery into the territories. Though Lincoln had entered the antislavery struggle later than Seward or Chase, his speeches possessed unmatched power, conviction, clarity, and moral strength.

At the same time, his native caution and precision with language—he rarely said more than he was sure about, rarely pandered to his various audiences—gave Lincoln great advantages over his rivals, each of whom tried to reposition himself in the months before the convention. Seward disappointed liberal Republicans when he tried to soften his fiery rhetoric to placate moderates. Bates infuriated conservatives with his strongly worded public letter. And Chase fooled no one when he tried to shift his position on the tariff at the last moment. Lincoln remained consistent throughout.

Nor, as the Chicago
Press and Tribune
pointed out, was “his avoidance of extremes” simply “the result of ambition which measures words or regulates acts.” It was, more accurately, “the natural consequence of an equable nature and a mental constitution that is never off its balance.”

In his years of travel on the circuit through central Illinois, engaging people in taverns, on street corners, and in shops, Lincoln had developed a keen sense of what people felt, thought, needed, and wanted. Seward, too, had an instinctive feeling for people, but too many years in Washington had dulled those instincts. Like Lincoln, Chase had spent many months traveling throughout his home state, but his haughty demeanor prevented him from truly connecting with the farmers, clerks, and bartenders he met along the way. Bates, meanwhile, had isolated himself for so long from the hurly-burly of the political world that his once natural political savvy was diminished.

It was Lincoln’s political intuition, not blind luck, that secured the convention site in Chicago. To be sure, the fact that Lincoln was “comparatively unknown” aided Norman Judd in landing the venue in Illinois. However, it was part of Lincoln’s strategy to hold his name back as long as possible and to “give no offence to others—leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.” It was Lincoln who first suggested to Judd that it might be important to secure Chicago. And it was Lincoln who first pointed out to his managers that Indiana might be won. Indeed, his guidance and determination were evident at every step along the way to the nomination.

Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way. It is hard to imagine Lincoln letting Greeley’s resentment smolder for years as Seward did. On the contrary, he took pains to reestablish rapport with Judd and Trumbull after they had defeated him in his first run for the Senate. His ability to rise above defeat and create friendships with previous opponents was never shared by Chase, who was unable to forgive those who crossed him. And though Bates had a warm circle of friends in St. Louis, most of them were not politicians. His campaign at the convention was managed by a group of men who barely knew him. Without burning personal loyalty, they had simply picked him as a potential winner, dropping him with equal ease when the path to his nomination proved bumpy.

Finally, Lincoln’s profound and elevated sense of ambition—“an ambition,” Fehrenbacher observes, “notably free of pettiness, malice, and overindulgence,” shared little common ground with Chase’s blatant obsession with office, Seward’s tendency toward opportunism, or the ambivalent ambition that led Bates to withdraw from public office. Though Lincoln desired success as fiercely as any of his rivals, he did not allow his quest for office to consume the kindness and openheartedness with which he treated supporters and rivals alike, nor alter his steady commitment to the antislavery cause.

In the end, though the men who nominated Abraham Lincoln in Chicago may not have recognized all these qualities, they chose the best man for the supreme challenge looming over the nation.

T
HE NEWS THAT
Lincoln had defeated Seward came as a shock to much of the country, especially to the Eastern Republican establishment. On Capitol Hill, word of Lincoln’s nomination “was received with general incredulity,” conceded Charles Francis Adams, “until by repeated announcements from different quarters it appeared that he had carried the day by a union of all the anti-Seward elements…. The House was in such a state of confusion that it was clear no business would be done, so we adjourned.”

Since people were unaware of the skill with which he had crafted his victory, Lincoln was viewed as merely the accidental candidate of the consolidated anti-Seward forces. Still an obscure figure, he was referred to by half the journals representing his own party as “Abram” rather than “Abraham.” Pointing out that when Lincoln had visited the Historical Library at Hartford the previous March, he signed the visitors’ book as “Abraham Lincoln,” the Democratic
New York Herald
caustically noted that “it is but fair to presume that a man knows his own name.” Lincoln wrote to George Ashmun, the Republican chairman of the acceptance committee: “It seems as if the question whether my first name is ‘Abraham’ or ‘Abram’ will never be settled. It is
‘Abraham.’”

Exulting in Lincoln’s lack of national experience, Democratic newspapers had a field day ridiculing his biography. He is “a third rate Western lawyer,” the
Herald
gloated. “The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.” Rejecting Seward and Chase, “who are statesmen and able men,” the
Herald
continued, “they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” and whose speeches are “illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.” Not content to deride his intellect, hostile publications focused on his appearance. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”

More violent attacks appeared in the
Charleston Mercury,
which scornfully asked: “After him what decent white man would be President?” Seward, the paper insisted, had been “thrust aside” because he “lacked the necessary nerve to carry through measures of Southern subjugation.” Lincoln, on the other hand, was “the
beau ideal
of a relentless, dogged, freesoil border-ruffian.” He was “an illiterate partizan,” claimed the influential
Richmond Enquirer,
“possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections for negro equality.”

The venom of such attacks reflected the growing discord and apprehension among Southern Democrats. As Lincoln prepared for the election campaign, his prospects of victory had been enhanced considerably by the splintering of the Democratic Party, which was now the only party with supporters in both the North and South. Meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, before Lincoln’s nomination, the Democratic National Convention had ended in chaos. A majority of delegates, comprised of Stephen Douglas’s supporters, had presented a platform designed to paper over the slavery issue. Unfortunately for Douglas, the time when the slavery issue could be veiled had passed. Recent events, including the
Dred Scott
decision and the raid on Harpers Ferry by John Brown had hardened the position of many Southern leaders. The moderate positions acceptable in the past were rejected by radical Southern politicians who now condemned all compromise, demanding complete freedom to bring slaves into all the territories and explicit congressional protection for those slaves. They dismissed the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” once widely acceptable, as an abandonment of Southern principle.

When the convention approved the moderate Douglas platform, the representatives from Alabama walked out, followed first by Mississippi and then the other Southern states. As the Mississippi delegation rose to walk out, one incensed delegate climbed on a chair for a rousing farewell speech, predicting that “in less than sixty days there would be a United South.” With this, observer Murat Halstead recorded, “the South Carolinians cheered loud and long,” the applause mounting as each state bolted. That night, “there was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston…. There was no mistaking the public sentiment of the city. It was overwhelmingly and enthusiastically in favor of the seceders.”

Unable to secure a two-thirds vote for any nominee, the deadlocked Charleston convention was forced to reconvene in Baltimore after Lincoln had been nominated by the Republicans. There Douglas would finally receive the nomination he had long pursued. It was too late, however, to reassemble the pieces of the last national party. The positions of the Northern and Southern Democrats were now irreconcilable, shattered by the same forces that had destroyed the Whigs and the Know Nothings.

With Douglas the Democratic nominee, Southern seceders reconvened to nominate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a staunch believer that slavery could not constitutionally be excluded from the territories. North Carolina–born senator Joseph Lane was chosen as the vice presidential nominee. To complicate matters further, the new Constitutional Union Party, composed of old-line Whigs and remnant Know Nothings, held its own convention, nominating John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts on a platform rooted in the illusory hope that the dissolution of the Union could be avoided by ignoring the slavery question altogether.

“The great democratic organization has finally burst into pieces,” Charles Francis Adams rejoiced in a diary entry of June 23, “and the two sections have respectively nominated candidates of their own.” Two weeks later, Lincoln informed a friend that he figured “the chances were more than equal, that we could have beaten the Democracy
united.
Divided, as it is, it’s chance appears very slim.” Nonetheless, he cautioned, “great is Democracy in resources; and it may yet give it’s fortunes a turn.”

While the Democrats were splintering, a committee came to Springfield to notify Lincoln formally of his nomination. “Mr. Lincoln received us in the parlor of his modest frame house,” wrote Carl Schurz, Seward’s avid supporter and a leading spokesman for the German-Americans. In the “rather bare-looking room,” Lincoln “stood, tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new but ill-fitting clothes, his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face.” Ashmun spoke for the committee, and Lincoln “responded with a few appropriate, earnest, and well-shaped sentences.” Afterward, everyone relaxed into a more general conversation, “partly of a jovial kind, in which the hearty simplicity of Lincoln’s nature shone out.” As the committee members left, Mr. Kelley of Pennsylvania remarked to Schurz: “Well, we might have done a more brilliant thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.” Still, Schurz acknowledged, other members of the committee “could not quite conceal their misgivings as to how this single-minded man, this child of nature, would bear himself in the contact with the great world.”

Another visitor, Thurlow Weed, detected an unexpected sophistication and political acumen in Lincoln. Still nursing wounds from Seward’s defeat, Weed traveled to Springfield at the invitation of Swett and Davis shortly after the convention. The two master politicians analyzed “the prospects of success, assuming that all or nearly all the slave States would be against [them],” determining which states “were safe without effort…which required attention,” and which “were sure to be vigorously contested.” Lincoln exhibited, Weed later wrote, “so much good sense, such intuitive knowledge of human nature, and such familiarity with the virtues and infirmities of politicians, that I became impressed very favorably with his fitness for the duties which he was not unlikely to be called upon to discharge.” Weed departed, ready to “go to work with a will.”

As Weed and Lincoln plotted election strategy, it must have been apparent to both men that there would, in actuality, be two elections. In the free states, the contest would pit Lincoln against Douglas, while the Southern Democrat, Breckinridge, would battle border-state Bell for the slave states. Douglas, once the defender of Southern principles, the author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act, was, by 1860, reviled throughout the South as a traitor or closet abolitionist. “Now what difference is it to the people whether Lincoln or Douglas shall be elected?” one Southern newspaper asked. “The same ends are sought by each, and we do not see any reason to choose between them.”

A Lincoln victory would require at least 152 electoral votes. Anything short of a majority would throw the election into the turbulent chamber of the House of Representatives, which might well prove unable to elect anyone. The choice of vice president would be left to the Southern-dominated Senate, which might well elect Joseph Lane, Breckinridge’s running mate, to occupy the vacant presidential chair. Lincoln, therefore, would have to capture virtually the entire North, including those states that had voted for the Democrat Buchanan in the last election.

In three of these “must win” states—Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—Douglas had considerable strength, especially in their southern counties, populated largely by settlers from the South. Although slavery was an issue everywhere, it was not always the dominant concern. Pennsylvanians were more interested in tariff protection, while voters in Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere in the Northwest wanted free land for settlers and internal improvements to expand commerce there. In addition, remnants of the anti-immigrant American Party lingered everywhere. The antislavery vote would undoubtedly go Republican, but that alone could not build a majority among such diverse constituencies.

L
INCOLN’S FIRST TASK
was to secure his hold on the Republican Party by conciliating and enlisting those who had fought him for the nomination—Chase, Seward, and Bates.

Chase was first approached to speak on behalf of Lincoln in the form of
“a mere printed circular.”
He felt, he later admitted, “not a little hurt & [his] first impulse was not to reply at all.” Then a personal letter from Lincoln arrived. Ignoring newspaper reports that Chase was “much chagrined and much dissatisfied with the nomination of so obscure a man as Mr. Abe Lincoln,” Lincoln graciously chose to construe Chase’s formal congratulatory letter as a symbol of his willingness to help. “Holding myself the humblest of all whose names were before the convention,” Lincoln wrote Chase, “I feel in especial need of the assistance of all; and I am glad—very glad—of the indication that you stand ready.” His ego soothed, Chase spoke at numerous Republican gatherings in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan during the weeks that followed. Though he harbored a lasting bitterness toward the Ohio delegation, he affirmed his hopes for the nation, arguing “first, that the Republican party is an inevitable party; secondly, that it grows out of the circumstances of the country; thirdly, that it proposes no measure which can be injurious to the true interests of the people.”

The formation of the Constitutional Union Party had made the support of Edward Bates vital to Lincoln. The party had enlisted many of the Missouri statesman’s old Whig supporters, and included many old Know Nothings. To engage the elder statesman’s support, Lincoln’s old friend Orville Browning called on Bates at his St. Louis home. Browning was in the best position to persuade Bates to help the Republican cause, since he had supported Bates’s presidential bid until the Illinois delegation, of which he was a member, had pledged itself to Lincoln. During their conversation, Bates “declined to take the stump” but promised to pen a public letter supporting Lincoln, even though he was aware, he said later, that in doing so, he would “probably give offense to some members of the
Constitutional Union party.”

True to his word, Bates produced a letter for Browning to publish in which he praised Lincoln lavishly, positioned him as a conservative, and affirmed his own determination to support the Republican ticket. “I give my opinion freely in favor of Mr. Lincoln,” Bates wrote. “I consider Mr. Lincoln a sound, safe, national man. He could not be sectional if he tried. His birth, his education, the habits of his life, and his geographical position, compel him to be national.” What was more, Bates continued, Lincoln had “earned a high reputation for truth, courage, candor, morals and ability so that, as a man, he is most trustworthy. And in this particular, he is more entitled to our esteem [than] some other men, his equals, who had far better opportunities and aids in early life.” Later in the campaign Bates wrote of Lincoln: “His character is marked by a happy mixture of amiability and courage; and while I expect him to be as mild as Fillmore, I equally expect him to be as firm as Jackson.”

While Lincoln worked to enlist the cooperation of all his rivals, he knew that the active support of William Henry Seward would be pivotal to his campaign. Seward’s following among Republicans had brought him to the edge of nomination. His reverberant phrase making—“irrepressible conflict,” “higher law than the Constitution”—though too flammable for some, had emblazoned the banners and helped define the Republican cause. The 35 electoral votes in his home state of New York might well prove the key to victory. And for Lincoln it did not bode well that Seward had returned to New York in the wake of the convention to find many of his supporters disillusioned and dispirited by the prospect of any other candidate.

“The campaign started heavily,” Kansas delegate Addison Procter recalled. “Enthusiasm was lacking and conditions were getting more and more desperate.” Hoping to organize a Lincoln Club in Kansas, Procter approached one of the state’s most respected Republicans and asked him to preside. The man vehemently refused: “You fellows knew at Chicago what this country is facing…. You knew that it will take the very best ability we can produce to pull us through. You knew that above everything else, these times demanded a statesman and you have gone and given us a
rail splitter.
No, I will not preside or attend.”