Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (46 page)

But Douglas's supporters in several lower-South states organized rival delegations to Baltimore. The fate of the Democratic party hung on the credentials fight there. After sober second thoughts about their willingness to let the bolters go to hell, most northern delegates were willing to compromise by seating some of the bolters and some of the challengers. But anti-Douglas southerners wanted all or nothing. They walked out once more, followed by most delegates from the upper South and a handful of proslavery northerners—more than one-third of the total. The bolters quickly organized their own convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (the current vice president) for president on a slave-code platform. The dispirited loyalists nominated Douglas and returned home with renewed bitterness in their hearts toward the rebels who had all but ensured the election of a Black Republican president.
³²

Republicans helped along that cause by adroit action at their national convention in Chicago. The basic problem confronting the party was the need to carry nearly all of the free states in order to win. Expecting to lose California, Oregon, and perhaps New Jersey, they must capture Pennsylvania and either Indiana or Illinois among the states they had lost in 1856 to achieve an electoral majority. William H. Seward's weakness in these lower-North states formed a growing cloud on the horizon of his anticipated nomination. To carry these states, a Republican had to attract support from many of the Fillmore votes of 1856. Seward's long record of hostility to nativism would undercut this effort. More important, his higher-law and irrepressible-conflict speeches had given him a radical reputation that daunted old Whig conservatives. Despite Seward's repudiation of John Brown and his ideals, some Harper's Ferry mud clung to his coattails. In addition, years of internecine Whig warfare in New York had earned Seward numerous enemies, among

32
. Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 262–72; Roy F. Nichols,
The Disruption of American Democracy
(New York, 1948), 309–20; Milton,
Eve of Conflict
, 450–79; Johannsen,
Douglas
, 759–73; Hesseltine, ed.,
Three Against Lincoln
, 178–278.

them Horace Greeley. A Seward nomination might also rob Republicans of the issue of corruption that scandals in the Buchanan administration had given them the opportunity to exploit. The bad smell of recent franchise grants by the New York legislature that could be traced to Seward's political manager Thurlow Weed tainted his candidate's repute. The rowdy, hard-drinking claque of gallery supporters that the Seward delegation brought to Chicago did nothing to improve the New Yorker's image."
³³

Coming into the convention with a large lead based on strength in upper-North states, Seward hoped for a first-ballot nomination. But Republicans were sure to win those states no matter whom they nominated. Pragmatists from all regions and politicians from the doubtful states combined in a stop-Seward movement. They had plenty of potential candidates: favorite sons from Vermont and New Jersey, and four men with state or regional backing whose aspirations went beyond favorite-son status: Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Edward Bates of Missouri, and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. But Chase shared Seward's handicap of a radical reputation and did not command unanimous support from even his own state. Cameron's notoriety as a spoilsman who had been in turn a Democrat, a Know-Nothing, and had flirted with Whiggery, militated against his candidacy among delegates concerned that the party should appear to be as pure as Caesar's wife. Bates seemed for a time Seward's strongest challenger because Greeley and the influential Blair family backed him in the hope that he might carry even a few border states as well as the lower North. But the colorless sixty-seven-year-old Missourian had been a slaveholder, a Know-Nothing, and in 1856 he had supported Fillmore. He therefore alienated too many constituencies whose support was essential—especially German Protestants. The belief that a Republican might carry a border state was fanciful, and Bates wound up with delegate support mainly from marginal states where Republican prospects were bleak or hopeless: Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Oregon.

This left Lincoln. By the time the convention's opening gavel came down on May 16, Lincoln had emerged from a position as the darkest of horses to that of Seward's main rival. Party leaders gradually recognized that the Illinoisian had most of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of an ideal candidate. He was a former antislavery Whig in a

33
. Mark W. Summers, " 'A Band of Brigands': Albany Lawmakers and Republican National Politics, 1860,"
CWH
, 30 (1984), 101–19.

party made up mostly of former antislavery Whigs. But despite his house-divided speech, he had a reputation as a moderate. Many former Democrats in the party could not stomach Seward, but they remembered with appreciation Lincoln's gesture in stepping aside to permit the election of antislavery Democrat Lyman Trumbull to the Senate in 1855. Lincoln had opposed the Know Nothings, which would help him with the German vote, but not so conspicuously as to drive away former American voters who would refuse to support Seward. Already known popularly as Honest Abe, Lincoln had a reputation for integrity that compared favorably with the dubious image of Thurlow Weed's New York machine. Of humble origins, Lincoln personified the free-labor ideology of equal opportunity and upward mobility. He
had
been born in a log cabin. In a stroke of political genius, one of Lincoln's managers exhibited at the Illinois state convention a pair of weatherbeaten fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split thirty years earlier. From then on, Lincoln the railsplitter became the symbol of frontier, farm, opportunity, hard work, rags to riches, and other components of the American dream embodied in the Republican self-image. Finally, Lincoln was from a state and region crucial to Republican chances, particularly if Douglas as expected became the nominee of northern Democrats. Except for William Henry Harrison, who died after a month in office, no president had been elected from the Old Northwest. The fastest-growing part of the country, this region believed that its turn had come. The selection of Chicago as the convention site incalculably strengthened Lincoln's candidacy. Huge, enthusiastic crowds composed mostly of Illinoisians turned up at the large hall built for the convention and nicknamed the "wigwam." Counterfeit tickets enabled thousands of leather-lunged Lincoln men to pack the galleries.

Lincoln was not an unknown factor in national politics before 1860. His contest with Douglas had won wide attention; the publication of the debates early in 1860 enhanced his reputation. In 1859 Lincoln had given political speeches in a half-dozen midwestern states. In February 1860 he addressed a large audience in New York's Cooper Institute and went on to New England where he gave eleven speeches. This first appearance of Lincoln in the Northeast was a triumph, enabling his supporters back in Illinois to crow that "no man has ever before risen so rapidly to political eminence in the United States."
³⁴
Partly on the

34
. William E. Baringer,
Lincoln's Rise to Power
(Boston, 1937), 41 for quotation, and
chaps. 1
–
4
for the emergence of Lincoln as Seward's main rival.

basis of these speeches Lincoln picked up delegate support in New England, winning nineteen votes from this Seward stronghold on the first ballot at Chicago.

Yet so obscure was Lincoln in certain circles before his nomination that some pundits had not included his name on their lists of seven or a dozen or even twenty-one potential candidates. Several newspapers spelled his first name Abram. But not for long. The turning point came when Indiana decided to join Illinois to give Lincoln solid first-ballot support from two of the most important lower-North states. This gave Lincoln's managers, a little known but brilliant group of Illinoisians, the chance to win a pledge from Pennsylvania to cast most of its second-ballot votes for Lincoln after the first-ballot gesture to Cameron. All through the feverish night of May 17–18 the Illinois politicos worked to line up other scattered second-ballot support for Lincoln. Despite the latter's injunction from Springfield to "
make no contracts that will bind me,"
his lieutenants in Chicago probably promised cabinet posts and other patronage plums to Indianians, to Cameron of Pennsylvania, and perhaps to the Blairs of Maryland and Missouri. How important these pledges were in winning votes is debatable—after all, Weed could make similar promises on Seward's behalf. The belief that Lincoln could carry the lower North and Seward could not was the most powerful Lincoln weapon. And delegates from other states were influenced by the action of Indiana and Pennsylvania because they knew that the party must capture them to win.
³⁵

The first ballot revealed Seward's weakness and Lincoln's surprising strength. With 233 votes needed to nominate, Seward fell sixty short at 173½ while Lincoln polled 102. The direction of the wind became

35
. For Lincoln's injunction, see
CWL
, IV, 50. Historians have long debated whether Lincoln's lieutenants pledged cabinet posts to Cameron and others. Evidence for such commitments is mostly second-hand or circumstantial. For an argument that binding pledges played a vital role, see Barringer,
Lincoln's Rise
, 214, 266–67, 277,334; for an opposing argument that no binding deals were made, see Willard L. King,
Lincoln's Manager: David Davis
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 137–38, 141, 162–64. For an assertion that pledges were made but were only one of several factors in securing Indiana and Pennsylvania for Lincoln, see Ncvins,
Emergence
, II, 256–57. For a balanced judgment that even if pledges were made they were less important than the conviction that Seward could not carry the lower North, see Don E. Fehrenbacher,
Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's
(Stanford, 1962), 159. Whether or not there were any firm promises, there does seem to have been an "understanding" that Cameron and Caleb Smith of Indiana would get cabinet posts—and so they did.

clear on the second ballot as Seward gained fewer than a dozen votes while Vermont, Pennsylvania, and scattered votes from other states including some of Ohio's switched to Lincoln, bringing him almost even with Seward at 181 votes. During these ballots the wigwam was electric with an excitement unprecedented in American politics. Ten thousand spectators, most of them for Lincoln, jammed the galleries and made so much noise that a reporter exhausted his store of similes to describe it: "Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, a score of big steam whistles going. . . . A herd of buffaloes or lions could not have made a more tremendous roaring." The crowd communicated a palpable impulse to delegates, reinforcing the dramatic growth of Lincoln's second-ballot total to convey an impression of irresistible momentum. As the third ballot began, suspense stretched nerves almost to the breaking point. Six more New England votes switched to Lincoln, along with eight from New Jersey, nine from Maryland, four more from his native Kentucky. When another fifteen Chase votes from Ohio went to Lincoln, the rafters literally shook with reverberation. Scores of pencils added the total before the clerk announced it: Lincoln had 231½ votes. Amid a sudden silence the Ohio chairman leaped onto his chair and announced the change of four more votes to Lincoln. With this "there was the rush of a great wind in the van of a storm—and in another breath, the storm was there . . . thousands cheering with the energy of insanity."
³⁶

None of the forty thousand people in and around the wigwam ever forgot that moment. All except the diehard Seward delegates were convinced that they had selected the strongest candidate. Few could know that they had also chosen the best man for the grim task that lay ahead. To balance the ticket the convention nominated for vice president Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, a former Democrat and one of Lincoln's earliest supporters in New England but also a friend of Seward. The Republican platform was one of the most effective documents of its kind in American history. While abating none of the antislavery convictions expressed in the 1856 platform, it softened the language slightly and denounced John Brown's raid as "the gravest of crimes." Gladly accepting the issues handed to Republicans by the opposition, the platform pledged support for a homestead act, rivers and harbors improvements, and federal aid for construction of a transcontinental railroad. For Pennsylvania, and for the Whiggish elements of the party in general,

36
. Hesseltine, ed.,
Three Against Lincoln
, 165, 158, 171.

the platform contained a tariff plank that called for an "adjustment" of rates "to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country" and "secure to the workingmen liberal wages." Another plank tilted the party away from nativism by declaring opposition to "any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens . . . from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired." To southern disunionists the platform issued a warning against "contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence."
³⁷