1858 (57 page)

It was the much-heralded rescue of fugitive slave John Price in Oberlin that, more than anything else, kept the antislavery campaign alive in 1858 and in the subsequent years. The Oberlin rescue had long-lasting political results. It enabled the Republicans to win the 1859 state elections there; in 1860, Republicans worked to produce one of the greatest electoral turnouts in U.S. history in Ohio. They voted for Republican Abraham Lincoln, who swept the state with nearly 66 percent of the popular ballots. If Lincoln had failed to carry Ohio, the presidential election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives, where Lincoln would have lost.

Ohio governor Brinkerhoff always directly connected the events. “Our victory in 1859 made a national victory possible in 1860 and its culminating result was the election of Abraham Lincoln as President.”
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During the Civil War, more than 750 Oberlin College students and alumni fought in the Union Army; hundreds of men from Oberlin and Wellington joined them in the ranks. Twenty-one black residents of Oberlin joined the fabled Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, one of the first black regiments. Six of the Oberlin Rescuers joined the army, too, including Charles Langston, who organized Ohio’s first black regiment.

Professor Henry Peck, the leader of the Rescuers in prison, became one of the Union Army’s most successful recruiters. He served as the editor of the
Lorain County News
toward the end of the Civil War and was later appointed U.S. minister to Haiti. John Mercer Langston, Charles’s brother, became the acting president of Howard University in 1872 and in 1890 became the first African-American elected to Congress from Virginia. Lawyer Ralph Plumb moved to Illinois after the war and from 1885–1889 represented one of its districts in Congress.

Richard Winsor, the man who rode to Wellington in a buggy defiantly holding his rifles in the air, joined the army and was badly wounded at the battle of Winchester, Virginia, in 1862. He became a minister after the war and claimed all of his life that the emancipation of John Price and the Rescuers’ ordeal in the jail was a major cause in the coming of the Civil War. He wrote, “No one could not see these thousands of noble men and women visiting us in that prison and notice the deep sadness in which they hung their heads for very shame for America’s name without perceiving that hearts were moved in this nation as nothing heretofore had ever moved them, and that patriots were being made ready for the war that was so soon to follow.”
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William Seward and his Svengali, political boss Thurlow Weed, were the two most overconfident men in America as the Republican Convention opened in Chicago in the summer of 1860. They believed that the “irrepressible conflict” speech at Rochester in October 1858, had locked up the presidential nomination for the New York senator. Seward had been so certain of it that he wasted eight months on a triumphal tour of Europe in 1859, spending no time politicking back home.

Both men were correct about one thing—the fiery Rochester campaign speech had made Seward the darling of the entire antislavery movement. They were wrong about Seward’s political invincibility, though. Abraham Lincoln’s men convinced the delegates at the convention that abolitionist Seward was, in fact,
too
popular. That was why Seward could not win the election and would bring down the party in his defeat.

The New Yorker would not capture the electoral votes of a single Southern state with his radical antislavery stand, they said. Douglas, the presumptive Democrat nominee, would defeat him throughout the South. Worse, using 1858 and 1859 election returns and public opinion polls, they argued that Seward could not carry the North either. He might sweep New England, New York, and Ohio, but could he take Illinois away from Douglas? Could he win New Jersey, where one-third of the state was below the Mason-Dixon Line and much of the crucial manufacturing trade of the Northern cities there was with the South? Could Seward capture the southernmost counties of Pennsylvania, which bordered on the slave states of Virginia and Maryland, where the close friends and relatives of the people in those conservative counties lived? Could he carry a border state like Maryland or Indiana? Could Seward, whose Rochester speech had hinted that a Civil War was inevitable, win the votes of the tens of thousands of moderates in every state who would vote against anybody who might lead the nation into such a conflict?

Lincoln’s men did an admirable job and despite the seeming inevitability of his victory, William Seward lost the presidential nomination to Abraham Lincoln on the fourth ballot at the Chicago convention.

In his historic debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln had grown from a little-known former congressman and state legislator into a recognizable national figure. The
Chicago Press and Tribune
wrote just after the election that the debates and election “made for him a splendid national reputation” and that while he had a “reputation confined to his own state,” he was now “a household word.” Right after the 1858 election, the S
andusky Ohio Commercial Register
became the first paper in the country to push for Lincoln’s election as president. The editor of the
Peoria Daily Message
clearly understood what had happened in the 1858 Illinois senate race. He wrote, “Defeat works wonders with some men. It has made a hero of Abraham Lincoln,” and went on to say that across the country there was a sudden movement to make Lincoln either president or vice president.
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The editor of the
Illinois State Journal
wrote of Lincoln, “All over the country his praises are on the lips of all good and true men. He has proved himself to be one of the foremost men of his party…his eloquent speeches… have not only brought him prominently forward before the people of the whole country, but contributed to make him a leader among leading men. [He is] a statesman for whom the Republicans throughout the Union can be proud of.”
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The cheers for Lincoln, and predictions that he would be a national figure soon, came not merely from his friends in the Republican press in Illinois, but from all over America and even from the Democrats. The editor of the
Concord (New Hampshire) Independent Democrat
wrote, “In Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas finds his equal and his superior, as a skillful debater and as an orator… Lincoln has excited enthusiasm among Republicans and displayed a degree of ability far exceeding the most sanguine expectations of those who expected most of him. He was the embodiment of the whole [1858] contest and [emerged] covered with honors.”

Even Horace Greeley, who worked so hard to undermine Lincoln, was impressed. He wrote, “Mr. Lincoln’s [1858] speeches justified the confidence and admiration of his supporters.”
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Adroitly pulling back from his “house divided” speech at the start of the 1858 Senate campaign, Lincoln successfully assured the voters of Illinois that while he did not approve of slavery, he accepted it in the states where it existed. He may have been against the institution all of his adult life, but he had reminded listeners in the debates with Douglas and in other talks that he appeared to approve of its existence where it was and merely hoped that it would die out eventually. In that 1858 Senate race, he had served as his own campaign manager and could do so again in the presidential election. He was a moderate who might not win any Southern states, but could carry every one of the Northern states, especially his home state of Illinois, all of the northwestern states of his region, plus Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

And he could win. Abraham Lincoln’s supporters continually reminded the delegates that he had actually beaten Douglas in the popular vote in the ’58 race, although he lost the vote in the state legislature, which decided Senate seats at the time. If he beat Douglas once, he could do it again. They could not have made that claim if Douglas had won both the popular and legislative vote; ironically, Lincoln could thank the meddling of President Buchanan for that.

Douglas was confident that he would be president and never understood how much his defense of the territories’ right to bar slavery if they so chose hurt him in the Southern states. He had given numerous speeches in the South after his legislative victory over Abraham Lincoln in the Senate race that placated few. He wrote a nineteen-page article in
Harper’s Weekly
on that same territorial theme that further antagonized Southerners. Most Southerners felt betrayed and abandoned by the Little Giant. They believed that he had lost his soul to his soaring ambition. None said it clearer, and with more force, than Senator Judah Benjamin of Louisiana in a Senate speech in the spring of 1860.

“He [Douglas] went home and under the stress of a local election, his knees gave way; his whole person trembled,” Benjamin said. “His adversary [Lincoln] stood upon principle and was beaten; and lo, he is the candidate for a mighty party for the Presidency of the United States. The senator from Illinois faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo, the grand prize of his ambition today slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former contest; and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency of the United States.”
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There was a Southern mutiny against Douglas at the Democratic Convention in Charleston that ended in chaos. Douglas failed to win the nomination and the Southern delegates stormed out and nominated two other men to run for president, Vice President John Breckinridge on the new Southern Democrat ticket and Tennessee’s John Bell on a Constitutional Union ticket, splitting the Democratic vote three ways. Douglas was finally nominated by the mostly Northern delegates of the Democratic Party, who met in Baltimore.

Douglas made history in the autumn of 1860 when he became the first presidential candidate to campaign across the country. He wasted much time campaigning in the South, where he had little support, and did not campaign long or hard enough in critical Northern states such as New York, Ohio, and his native Illinois. He faced an uphill struggle as Bell and Breckinridge solidified their hold on the electoral votes of the Southern states, winning almost all of the traditional Democratic votes between them.

Lincoln, perhaps fearful of verbal missteps in public speeches, did not personally campaign and followed the tradition of letting party leaders campaign for him. Back home in Springfield with his advisers, he devised a brilliant strategy in which he planned to carry just about all of the Northern states, targeting New York, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, and completely ignored the South. Those states alone would give him enough electoral votes to become president. On election day, Lincoln carried every Northern state except New Jersey, winning the election in New York where the strenuous campaigning of Seward and Weed brought him victory—and the White House.

Seward, so certain he was going to be president in 1858, became Lincoln’s secretary of state. He served the president well and, in a key part of Union strategy to win the Civil War, convinced England to stay out of the conflict when they were wooed by the South. Seward was almost killed in the assassination plot against Lincoln in 1865.

Douglas, exhausted from the 1860 campaign, began yet another national campaign in the winter of 1861—this time to persuade Southerners who had seceded to rejoin the Union. His efforts failed, and so did his health. He died on June 3, 1861; his friend, President Abraham Lincoln, whom he had bested in their 1858 Senate race, had black drapes placed on White House windows and mourned his loss for days.