Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (30 page)

Seward was also weighed down by one of his convictions. The Republican Party was a coalition of disparate elements, united by the issue of slavery expansion. As Lincoln had put it in the “House Divided” speech, “we gathered
from the four winds.” Among the disparate elements were antislavery veterans of the American or Know-Nothing Party, which had flourished and died in the mid-1850s. But Seward was boldly pro-immigrant, going so far in his days as governor of New York to call for state support of Catholic schools. No nativist could ever be comfortable with him.

The opposite drawback affected Edward Bates, an elderly lawyer and politician from Missouri. Bates might give the Republicans clout in the border states, and Greeley (whatever nice things he said about the Cooper Union speech) backed Bates for the nomination for that reason. But Bates had backed the American Party in 1856, and German Americans, who were a mainstay of the Republican Party in the Midwest, would not forgive him for it.

Salmon Portland Chase had been the first Republican governor of Ohio, and Ohio was the third-largest state in the country. Chase
was intelligent, energetic, and idealistic—his opposition to slavery had taken him into the Liberty and Free Soil parties in the 1840s, before he became a Free Soil Democrat, then a Republican. But he was both humorless and sharp-elbowed. His rise to office in Ohio had left a trail of bruised competitors. His own state would not be united behind him.

Simon Cameron was a senator from Pennsylvania, the nation’s second-largest state. He was a wheeler-dealer, turning alternately—and profitably—from politics to business and back. One deal from the 1830s had given him an unfortunate nickname: he was thought to have cheated Indians whose claims on the federal government he had been appointed to settle, and was known thereafter as the Great Winnebago Chieftain. Pennsylvanians were used to him, and someone like Thurlow Weed could understand him, but ordinary voters outside his home state might look askance.

Years later, Leonard Swett, a veteran of Illinois politics, would attribute Lincoln’s success to shrewd positioning: “His tactics were, to get himself in the right place and remain there . . . until events would find him
in that place.” Certainly Lincoln occupied a surprisingly strong position as 1860 unfolded.

His stature as a politician was noticeable, but not so noticeable as to appear threatening to Seward and the other front-runners. His 1858 Senate race and the Cooper Union speech had put him on the national stage—just. He had the support of those who knew him well—Illinois Republicans were solid for him—and competitors who did not yet know him well did not pay enough attention to him.

He had devoted his energies to slavery expansion, the issue that defined his party—the “question about which all true
men do care,” he had called it at Cooper Union—without blotting his record with inconvenient positions on other issues. Illinoisans knew he was opposed to Know-Nothingism—in one of his speeches during his 1858 Senate race, he said that all “
liberty-loving men,” German, Irish, and Scandinavian as well as old-stock Americans, shared the principles of the Declaration of
Independence. But he did not have a record of pro-immigrant policies to match Seward’s.

Being from Illinois was one of his strongest attributes. The 1860 census would show that Illinois had become the fourth-largest state in the nation, and Chicago the ninth-largest city (up from twenty-fourth a decade earlier). The Democrats had carried Illinois in the 1856 presidential election, as they had in every contest since statehood. But the Republican and American parties together had outpolled them. If the Republicans could carry the state in 1860, they would have a fighting chance in the Electoral College.

Yet, despite what Swett said, a lot of work went into Lincoln’s presidential campaign. Norman Judd, a Lincoln man who served on the Republican National Committee, had lobbied to put the party’s convention in Chicago. A home-state advantage was a great leg-up for a candidate. Your operatives knew the setting, your supporters were on the spot to hold rallies and make noise. The other city in the running for the convention had been St. Louis, which would have been a boon to Bates, but the less obvious contender took the prize.

Early in May, before the national convention, Illinois Republicans held a state party convention in Decatur, where Lincoln acquired an image that would serve him through Chicago and beyond: his cousin John Hanks marched into the hall carrying a rail that Lincoln had supposedly split decades ago. Lincoln, who was on the podium at the time, admitted he could not recognize that particular rail, but said he had split “
many better ones” in his day. So Lincoln the Railsplitter was born. The drudgery he had fled as a young man now came back to benefit him. His rube/boob persona became heroic; paintings and cartoons showed him with his maul, swinging away. Twenty years after William Henry Harrison’s Log Cabin Campaign, Lincoln supporters would run their own version.

The Republican convention ran from May 16 to 18. Candidates in those days might attend state conventions, but they could not, with propriety, appear at national conventions, so Lincoln stayed in Springfield
while his associates took care of business in Chicago. They did a superb job. Judd, who was in charge of seating arrangements for the convention, placed the New York and Pennsylvania delegations far apart, so that the Seward and Cameron camps could not easily communicate. Lincoln supporters flooded the city thanks to cut rates offered by Illinois railroads (now friendlier than they had been two years earlier); fake convention tickets were printed for them to ensure that all Lincoln supporters had seats in the spectator galleries.

Lincoln, like all statesmen, solemnly told his minions to make no deals that would bind him later, and his minions, like all minions, did what they had to do. A wonderful story describes Lincoln’s floor manager, David Davis, having been reminded in mid-deal of their candidate’s prohibition, howling “Lincoln ain’t here!” and dealing anyway. Lincoln biographer
David Herbert Donald doubts that it is true. But he does concede that Davis promised the Pennsylvania delegation that there would be a spot in the cabinet for Cameron if its votes swung to Lincoln after the first ballot.

The convention made its choice on May 18, its last day. With 233 votes needed to win the nomination, Seward led on the first ballot, with 173½ (states with more delegates than votes cast fractional votes). Lincoln was second with 102. Cameron, Chase, and Bates had about 50 votes each, and there were scattered votes for half a dozen others. On the second ballot Seward rose to 184½, but Lincoln, buoyed by an infusion of Pennsylvanians plus defectors from other candidates, was right behind him with 181. Seward had the lead, but Lincoln had the momentum. On the third ballot Lincoln rose to 231½; a switch of four votes in Ohio put him over the top and triggered a stampede of last-minute conversions.

Lincoln spent the day in Springfield following events by telegram, chatting with cronies, and playing handball in a vacant lot. Christopher Brown, a young lawyer who was one of his handball partners, recalled that Lincoln told
one of his off-color jokes to pass the time. This one was about George Washington, the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, and a “back house” (outhouse):

It appears that shortly after we had peace with England, Mr. Allen had occasion to visit England, and while [he was] there the English took great pleasure in teasing him and trying to make fun of the Americans, and General Washington in particular, and one day they got a picture of General Washington, and hung it up [in] the back house where Mr. Allen could see it. And they finally asked Mr. Allen if he saw that picture of his friend in the back house.

Mr. Allen said no, but said he thought that it was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to keep it.

“Why?” they asked.

“For,” said Mr. Allen, “there is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.”

Ethan Allen had been a British prisoner of war for a year and a half during the Revolution, and for part of that time he was held in England. But the rest of the story belonged to art rather than history.

It is obvious why Lincoln was telling jokes at such a time. He was “nervous, fidgety,” the young lawyer recalled. When Fate comes to the front door, some men whistle, some men whittle; Lincoln told jokes. It is equally obvious why he told this particular joke. If he were nominated, he might sit where Washington sat. And with the country in the state it was in, that was enough to send any man to the back house.

The Democrats had already held their convention in Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of April, and it was a debacle. The party’s rules required its nominee to win not a majority but two-thirds of the convention’s votes—202 out of 303. Since James Buchanan, the incumbent, had long ago announced that he would serve only one term, Stephen Douglas was the front-runner. But his fight against the Lecompton Constitution and his failed dalliance with the Republicans had made him odious to southern Democrats, and there were enough of these at the convention to make a two-thirds vote for him virtually impossible.
Southern hardliners, meanwhile, demanded that the party platform call on the federal government to protect property in slaves in the territories. Such a law would give substance to Chief Justice Taney’s opinion that the Fifth Amendment sheltered slavery there; it would be
Dred Scott
with teeth, and the end of popular sovereignty. Douglas could not possibly accept such a plank without forfeiting all self-respect.

Douglas led for two days of balloting, hovering between 145 and 152½ votes. A handful of other candidates trailed behind him. Fifty disgruntled southern delegates simply left the convention, awaiting events in another hall in Charleston. After fifty-seven ballots, the exhausted Democrats voted to reassemble in Baltimore in June. There, after two more ballots and more walkouts by southerners, the delegates who remained declared Douglas their candidate. The southerners, meeting in another venue in Baltimore, then tapped the current vice president, John Breckinridge, a thirty-nine-year-old Kentuckian, as theirs. Douglas would stand for popular sovereignty, Breckinridge for expanding slavery into the territories under the aegis of the federal government.

There had been yet another convention in May, mostly of old Whigs, meeting in Baltimore. They called themselves the Constitutional Union Party, and announced that their sole aim was to uphold the Constitution, the Union, and the laws. Noble goals. But what should the laws be? That they would not say. Fanatical in their moderation, they tapped John Bell, a sixty-four-year-old Whig and former senator from Tennessee.

Faced with a split in the Democratic Party, Lincoln seemed bound for victory, unless the plethora of candidates kept him from winning a majority in the Electoral College, which would throw the choice to the House. This had already happened in the election of 1824, and some politicians still active remembered the occasion.

The four candidates divided the national political map on sectional lines. Breckinridge and Bell would make pitiful showings in most northern states; Lincoln would win a mere 1,000 votes each in Virginia and in his birthplace, Kentucky, and was not even on the ballot in any state farther south. Douglas was the only man running nationwide. His
campaign was both desperate and heroic. Breaking all precedent, he barnstormed the country, as if he could buck the odds by sheer effort. The other candidates relied on their party’s platforms and on their own past statements to make their views known.

Some of the most interesting past statements had been uttered by Bell’s running mate, Edward Everett, an old Massachusetts Whig. Everett, a former congressman, governor, and diplomat, had since 1856 served as the self-appointed posthumous spokesman for George Washington. He had crisscrossed the country giving an oration entitled “The Character of George Washington” dozens of times, donating his fees to an association of patriotic ladies who aimed to buy a now-decrepit Mount Vernon from Washington’s great-grand-nephew, and restore it. Everett’s speech was a charitable enterprise; it was also an effort to summon the nation to Washington’s principles, as Everett understood them. “The Character of George Washington” was a much better speech than the one Robert Winthrop had given at the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument. Everett compared Washington intelligently and favorably to other titans of the eighteenth century: the Duke of Marlborough, Peter and Frederick the Great, Napoleon. But Everett’s political message for America was the same as Winthrop’s: Washington was the icon of unity—unity over everything, unity without content: “O, that from the heavens to which he has ascended, his voice might even now be heard and teach us to unite again in the brotherhood of love, as we are united on one precious remembrance
of the past.” It was the best that those who merely idolized Washington could offer. It was paltry enough.