Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (20 page)

Lincoln used the weeks before the national convention quietly to impress members of the out-of-state delegations. In the main he and his advisers negotiated shrewdly. They knew that for Lincoln to be promoted in status from favorite son to the “stop-Seward” candidate, around whom the battleground states could realistically unite, he had to be able to show real support outside Illinois. Taking encouragement from friendly correspondents in Ohio and Indiana, Lincoln delicately and confidentially set out his strategy. “My name is new in the field; and I suppose I am not the
first
choice of a very great many,” he conceded in late March. “Our policy, then, is 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.” A month later, he could tell Richard M. Corwine, a Republican lawyer from Ohio: “Everywhere, except in Illinois, and possibly Indiana, one or another is prefered to me, but there is no positive objection.”
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Throughout he carefully said nothing to the personal detriment of other candidates, yet he was quick to note their respective electoral weaknesses and was far from squeamish in sanctioning early discussions between his advisers and unpledged delegates on arrival in Chicago.

Lincoln itched to be at the convention, but knew it was improper to attend. He was, he said, “almost too much of a candidate to go, and not quite enough to stay at home.”
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His fate would be out of his hands, but he could depend on a devoted team of delegates. They were led by the massive and formidable David Davis. Made up of Lincoln’s long-standing professional friends and political associates, including Judd, Palmer, Fell, Ozias M. Hatch, Jesse K. Dubois, Swett, and Herndon, the group set aside their personal feuds and over five or six days worked themselves to exhaustion. Seward, they judged, could rely firmly on the support of over 150 of the convention’s 450 or so voting delegates. Yet they not only stopped the well-placed front-runner but secured the crown for their own man. It was a brilliant and by no means inevitable achievement, the result in part of contingent circumstances but also of the Republican leadership’s rational calculation of the party’s best electoral interests.

First, the convention’s location gave Lincoln a distinct advantage. The national committee had met in the previous December and at Judd’s disingenuous prompting had chosen Chicago, deeming it a neutral site which would favor neither Seward nor any of the other prominent contenders. The burgeoning young city, a railroad hub and center of the grain trade, was confidently Republican. Lincoln clubs had been active for weeks, and the
Press and Tribune
(though not Wentworth’s
Democrat
) was emphatic for Lincoln. During the week of the convention the city’s 100,000 inhabitants played host to tens of thousands of visitors, mainly Lincoln’s supporters ferried in at the excursion rate that Judd had negotiated. Lincolnites would pack the specially constructed gigantic wooden Wigwam on the day of nomination.

Second, the tactics adopted by Lincoln’s men served him admirably. Davis’s team were determined to antagonize no one in their tailored conversations with various state delegations. They extolled their friend’s positive attributes: his character and abilities, his romantic progress from humble origins, his potential as a candidate, and his fixed but unthreatening commitment to nonextension. The legend later developed that Davis and his men supplemented this sweet-talking with offers of government positions and even cabinet posts in exchange for pledges. This may have been true in the case of the Pennsylvania delegates after the first ballot: in response to the demand that Cameron be made secretary of the treasury, Davis made an offer, but one which was vague enough to be true to the letter of Lincoln’s express instruction: “
Make no contracts that will bind me.
”
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In the main, though, Lincoln’s men had no need to resort to bribes. Rather, they appealed to the hard electoral logic which made Lincoln the party’s most astute choice.

In baldly asserting that Seward was too dangerous for the battleground states they simply joined a larger chorus which included Greeley, who masked his personal grudge against a former ally by insistent appeals to pragmatism, and Henry S. Lane of Indiana and Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania, both of them gubernatorial candidates in states where Republicans had yet to occupy the governor’s mansion. Former Democrats also worked keenly to block Seward’s nomination. The virus of doubt began to affect even delegates from New England, where Seward was assumed to be strong. Their anxieties were encouraged by Gideon Welles of Connecticut and Hannibal Hamlin, who insisted that his Maine cadre at Chicago secure a candidate who could carry the lower North.

If not Seward, then who? Certainly not Chase, whose radicalism made him just as unattractive to the doubtful states. There the likeliest options had for some time seemed to be Bates and McLean, their names more recently joined by Lincoln’s. Only three of these four states had favorite sons who would enjoy their delegations’ support on the first ballot at least: these were Cameron of Pennsylvania, Dayton of New Jersey, and Lincoln of Illinois. Indiana lacked a home candidate: its votes on the first ballot would thus be crucial. Davis and Dubois met some of the Indiana delegates promptly on arrival. They pushed at an open door, helped by the influential Caleb B. Smith, Lincoln’s close Indiana friend from their days as Whig congressmen in 1848. Two days before the convention’s formal opening, the Indiana delegation declared that it would vote unanimously for Lincoln on the first ballot. Its numbers, when added to Illinois’s, would put Lincoln well ahead of Bates and McLean.
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Davis’s strategy was falling into place. “Our programme,” Swett later explained, “was to give Lincoln 100 votes on the first ballot, with a certain increase afterwards, so that in the doubtful Convention our fortunes might seem to be rising, and thus catch the doubtful.” The next step was to secure from the other two battleground states the promise of support on the second ballot. On the eve of voting, Davis, Caleb Smith, and a few others met with a similar number from Pennsylvania and New Jersey to agree on a candidate. Though factionalism between the Curtin-McClure and the Cameron elements delayed Pennsylvania’s final endorsement until the next morning, a clearheaded determination to stop Seward carried the day, helped by a vague pledge about a job for Cameron.
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The groundwork laid, the Illinois delegates gathered in the Wigwam on the morning of Friday, May 18. Much has been made of the care with which Judd and others stage-managed the occasion to Lincoln’s advantage. Seating the delegations so that the New Yorkers and other Sewardites were sealed off from the swing voters certainly did no harm. Nor did packing the audience with local Lincolnites and engaging the stentorian Dr. Ames of Chicago (whose voice was reputed to carry across Lake Michigan on a clear day) to lead the Lincoln yell. If impulsive action had been needed to overcome doubts about Lincoln’s nomination, then the Wigwam’s high-decibel solidarity behind their favorite Illinoisan would surely have provided it. But fundamentally it was rational political logic, not manufactured excitement, that drove Lincoln’s cause to its successful climax.

On the first ballot Seward led, as expected, but there were straws in the wind. Instead of sweeping New England, which should have been a bastion of his strength, he yielded New Hampshire to Lincoln, who also took votes in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Seward also did less well than expected in the slave states of Virginia and Kentucky, where Lincoln won a majority. The New Yorker’s 1731⁄2 votes, 60 short of what was needed, put him clearly ahead. But in taking the entire Indiana and Illinois vote, and winning more than a scattering elsewhere, Lincoln reached a total of 102, over twice the strength of any one of the other anti-Seward candidates: Cameron (501⁄2), Chase (49), Bates (48), and McLean (12). A second round of balloting promptly followed. Lincoln continued to advance in New England. When Vermont gave him its entire ten votes, the Sewardites “started as if an Orsini bomb had exploded.”
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More dramatic still, Pennsylvania withdrew Cameron’s name and gave most of its vote to Lincoln, who also made gains in Ohio and Iowa. By the end of this round, Seward had advanced only modestly, to 1841⁄2; Lincoln stood just three and half votes behind; Chase and Bates fell further back.

Lincoln himself had spent the early part of the day playing fives, a favorite ball game, and then moved between the telegraph office, his law office, and the office of the
Illinois State Journal.
After the first two ballots he could see the way the tide was running. Eventually news arrived of the third and final ballot. Seward’s support had held steady, but Lincoln, picking up conservative votes in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, had passed the threshold of 233, thanks to four votes from Chase’s Ohio, and Seward’s men had then moved to make the vote unanimous. Lincoln, one of his companions that morning recalled, reacted “with apparent coolness,” but “a close observer Could detect Strong emotions within.” He jestingly told well-wishers to shake his hand while they had the chance, since “honors elevate some men.” He set off home, saying: “Well gentlemen there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I am.”
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Lincoln’s supporters in Chicago showed rather less self-control. His exhausted managers wept. An Iowan, Charles C. Nourse, shrieked in rapture: “We have nominated the best man in the country for President and beaten that New York crowd of wire pullers. Why shouldn’t we shout?
.
.
.
Whoop
!
” Still, high emotion notwithstanding, the delegates’ choice of candidate had been driven by rational consideration of electoral need—as, indeed, was their subsequent nomination for the vice presidency of Hannibal Hamlin, who, as a New Englander and ex-Democrat, would balance a ticket headed by a westerner and former Whig. America’s new mass democratic forms had put a premium on the electable, or “available,” candidate. A sequence of nominations (Harrison, Polk, Taylor, Pierce, and Frémont) in every presidential race since 1840 had shown that national political standing and proven executive ability came in a poor second to supposed electoral “availability.” Eighteen sixty was not the first time that the actions of a nominating convention prompted surprise bordering on disbelief within Washington’s political circles. In Chicago, however, once Republican delegates had concluded that Seward was too risky a choice, there was no such incredulity. Lincoln emerged, as the radical Edward Pierce explained, as “the only candidate truly reliable who would not, like Seward and Chase, encounter conservative prejudices.”
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THE 1860 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: THE POWER OF A RIGHTEOUS PARTY

On the evening of his nomination, Lincoln spoke to a crowd of celebrating Republicans who had paraded to his home after a rally in the statehouse. He told them “that he did not suppose the honor of such a visit was intended particularly for himself, as a private citizen, but rather to the representative of a great party.” This was more than simple modesty. Lincoln keenly understood that his election in November would depend, even more than the day’s success, on the power of the Republican organization. News of Lincoln’s nomination produced a rash of spontaneous local “ratification meetings” across the North, marked by cannon salutes, bonfires, fireworks, drums, processions, banners, and the pealing of church bells. In Chicago one observer thought “Babel had come again, and the Democratic Jericho shook at the shouts and blowing of trumpets and holding of torches in the left hands of the Republican Gideons.” Promising as these immediate signals seemed, a more sustained effort would be needed to put Lincoln in the White House.
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First, after the frictions of the convention, the party had to be seen to unify behind a candidate not universally approved. One irate New Englander complained: “You fellows at Chicago . . . knew that above everything else these times demanded a statesman, and you have gone and given us a
rail splitter.
” None of the high-ranking deputation that carried the convention’s decision to Springfield, few of whose members knew Lincoln personally, was so scornful, but as they gathered awkwardly in the Lincolns’ provincial parlor, noting his ungainliness and modesty, some entertained private misgivings about his ability to cope with the ordeal ahead. Yet Lincoln’s intelligence and human qualities made their mark during a brief, informal discussion. As they left, one of them remarked to Carl Schurz: “Well, we might have done a more brilliant thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.”
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The grief of the defeated aspirants at Chicago stopped short of rancor. Bates, following a visit from Browning, published a letter of unequivocal support for Lincoln (“a sound, safe, national man”), though he declined to take the stump. Cameron publicly endorsed the Republican ticket within days. In Ohio, the McLean brigade pledged their support, and Chase, though he felt deeply betrayed, did not blame Lincoln, in whom he declared complete confidence. Crucial amongst the Sewardites was Thurlow Weed. Davis persuaded the maestro of New York politics to visit Springfield within a week of the convention. Lincoln reported that his visitor “asked nothing of me at all. He merely seemed to desire a chance of looking at me, keeping up a show of talk while he was at it.” After five hours of discussions, Weed departed, deeply impressed by Lincoln’s political sagacity and “intuitive knowledge of human nature.” Meanwhile, Seward himself spoke publicly of his confidence in Lincoln and urged his friends to set aside their disappointment. Lincoln reciprocated by allaying fears that he would freeze out his opponent’s supporters when he distributed presidential patronage. Davis, speaking for Lincoln, assured one of Seward’s chief lieutenants that, as candidate and president, the Illinoisan would use every available talent and “deal fairly with all.”
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