Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (23 page)

Parading in the robes of righteousness and godliness, Republicans in 1860 brandished their Whiggish pedigree. Just as Whigs had striven to present themselves as the guardians of Christian respectability, so Lincoln’s party aimed to marshal the energies of the religiously devout behind a standard-bearer seen to be, in the words of the
Chicago Press and Tribune,
“worthy of the holy cause.”
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In doing so they buttressed Lincoln’s sound antislavery credentials by claiming two related qualities for him: firm Christian piety and incorruptible honesty. Each of these connected to the larger theme of Republicans’ devotion to the Protestant faith and its values.

Lincoln the candidate took on the hue of sound Protestant orthodoxy. As Scripps’s biography explained: “He is a regular attendant upon religious worship, and though not a communicant, is a pew-holder and liberal supporter of the Presbyterian church in Springfield, to which Mrs. Lincoln belongs.” Lincoln was extolled in the press as one who had “always held up the doctrines of the Bible, and the truths and examples of the Christian religion, as the foundation of all good.” He enjoyed the confidence of the religious community and was a staunch believer in Sabbath schools; the
Albany Evening Journal
exulted that an opinion poll of Sunday school excursionists from Ogdensburgh, New York, overwhelmingly supported him. Party publicists also celebrated Lincoln as a man of blameless behavior. He never used profane language. He did not gamble. He avoided all intoxicating liquor, even wine.
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In this portrait there was enough truth to absolve Republican editors of outright perjury. Lincoln had indeed attended the First Presbyterian Church since 1850; he was known amongst his neighbors, including the Baptist minister Noyes W. Miner, as “a temperance man” who was “never known to profane the name of God.” But, as we have seen, Lincoln was no pious evangelical Protestant.
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The reality of Lincoln’s private beliefs, however, mattered less than that his promoters kept him clear of the taint of “infidelity,” so electorally troublesome for him in the 1840s, and projected him as the rescuer of the nation “from the rule of a Godless . . . Administration.” Republicans, as had the Whigs before them, commonly castigated Democrats for a moral laxness which they ascribed to religious heterodoxy, and especially to the ethical ravages wrought by Catholic influence. Lincoln himself never sought directly to exploit religious sectarianism for electoral gain, but amongst the Republican editors who upheld his Christian integrity were those who eagerly branded Stephen Douglas with the mark of the Beast. They cast the Little Giant as a renegade: born in Vermont, he emigrated “early enough to avoid contracting many of the Puritan virtues which add luster to the character of that people.” A moral leper and a drunkard (one report told of his being helped, inebriated, out of his railroad car), Douglas “trifle[d] with the law of Sinai as freely as a hoary-headed gambler would . . . throw dice on a New Orleans sugar barrel for ‘pig tail’ tobacco!” Having abandoned his family’s Calvinism in favor of close ties with the Catholic hierarchy, he had visited Rome and allegedly submitted to the pope, receiving absolution and “the right hand of fellowship.” His marriage to a Catholic wife and the support of Romanist voters in 1858 pointed to his “secret understanding” with Church leaders, “whereby he is to have their votes . . . for a consideration.” The “troop of wild Irish” would surely support Douglas again in 1860 and, with their man in the White House, make Archbishop John Hughes “the keeper of the conscience of the King.” But vote for Lincoln, insisted the
Rail Splitter,
“and this Government [would] still remain in Protestant control.”
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Republicans’ anti-Catholicism played upon a number of related but distinct fears: the theological-ecclesiastical anxieties of staunch Protestants who regarded Rome as the Antichrist and the murderer of religious liberties; the social phobia of nativists who equated Catholicism with Irish immigrants and a dram-shop culture of “blackguardism, . . . riot and soul-sickening blasphemy”; and the political antipathy of antislavery reformers who believed the Roman Church to be minted from the same metal as a slave power equally hostile to republican freedoms. The Republican platform stood silent on the Catholic question. But the party’s anti-Catholic posture had been well established through the later 1850s, and many of its speakers and candidates in 1860 were known nativists and anti-Romanists. “Catholicism and Republicanism are as plainly incompatible as oil and water,” declared Charles Ray’s
Chicago Press and Tribune
early in the campaign, recognizing that Republican success depended on attracting the “Protestant” American party voters of 1856, not least in Lincoln’s own backyard of Sangamon County. When a possible fusion of Bell’s Constitutional Union men and Douglas Democrats threatened to weaken Lincoln’s prospects in New York and elsewhere, Republicans sneered at the unnatural yoking of “the Puritan and the Black-leg,” of “rowdyism and conservatism,” and of “seditionists and law-abiders.”
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In the event, the “Protestant” Lincoln benefited from an anti-Catholic animus which he had done nothing to inflame and of whose political exploitation he almost certainly disapproved. Curiously, the Democrats generally failed to exploit the ambiguities of Lincoln’s “infidel” past, by which they might have compromised his value as a Protestant champion of orthodoxy, an omission which appears even odder in the light of their creativity in 1856, when they had regaled voters with imaginative tales of John Frémont’s “Catholicism.”
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If winning nativist support was essential to Republican victory, so, too, was garnering a decent proportion of foreign-born voters. The party’s leaders knew that immigrants comprised a critical 20 percent of the electorate in the Northwest. The Irish were mostly barnacled to the Democratic party, but the large German population provided a more plausible target for Republican propaganda. At Chicago Schurz had helped design the homestead plank and repudiate the Massachusetts naturalization law with the specific aim of appeasing the Germans. He and Koerner left the convention confident that they could loosen the Democrats’ hold over their fellow countrymen. From New York to Wisconsin they energized a cadre of German-language speakers and newspaper editors, each appealing to free-soil consciences, and rebuking audiences of Democrat-inclined farmers, tradesmen, and laborers for tamely submitting to “party-serfdom.” They faced an uphill but not impossible struggle. Democrats tried to connect Lincoln with his party’s nativist elements, by alleging that he had been a member of a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy at the height of the “dark lantern” excitement. Lincoln resisted a public denial, which might have cost him valuable nativist votes, trusting that his “Canisius letter” of the previous year and the influence of the
Illinois Staats-Anzeiger
would be enough to stymie Democratic maneuvers.
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Stunningly—thanks to the volubility of Schurz and other loyal Germans, and to Lincoln’s silence—Republicans managed to mix anti-Catholic oil and pro-immigrant water.

Closely related to the Republicans’ use of anti-Romanist sentiment was their stress on corruption in the national administration and their relish for a language of purification that Whigs had so adroitly used before them—most notably in 1840, when they turned Harrison into a crusader against Jacksonian filth. Twenty years on, after forming three of the last four national administrations, Democrats once more faced the charge of steering the nation toward moral crisis. Republicans’ promise to encourage “a revival of
moral honesty and integrity,
in all departments of life” took on even greater urgency after June 1860, when the report of the congressional Covode Committee exposed the Buchanan administration’s dishonesty in Kansas affairs and government contracts. An abridged edition became a mainstay of the Republican campaign.
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The Democrats, claimed Republican editors, in language blending genuine outrage and political calculation, formed “the rendezvous of thieves, the home of parasites and bloodsuckers, the enemy of God and man, the stereotyped fraud, the sham, the hypocrite, the merciless marauder, and the outlawed renegade and malefactor.” The administration had “sunk the nation into a gulf of corruption and misrule,” putting at stake “the very existence of the Republic.” The times demanded “moral independence in politics” and a new Luther.
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An unfriendly caricature of a two-faced Lincoln on the stump. The left-facing Lincoln—at a Republican state convention in 1858—denies any presidential ambition or capacity to reward supporters with jobs (“cabbages”); the other, after his nomination
for the presidency two years
later, tells his puzzled and uninspired hearers, “I come to
see, and be seen.”

Lincoln met that need. What Democrats treated with scorn—his lack of executive experience—became a source of campaigning strength, a promise of simple government. Across the North, Republican speakers and writers seized on his reputation for Calvinist integrity. Joshua Giddings told a ratification meeting at Oberlin that “every beat of ‘honest Abe’s’ heart was a throb of sincerity and truth.” The
Chicago Press and Tribune
insisted that he was “above all, religiously honest.” His legal career, explained the
Ohio State Journal,
showed “no crooked turns, no evasion, no duplicity in his past life, official or private. All is plain, manly, straightforward and consistent.” A Connecticut paper maintained that he “always conducts his argument on high moral ground. Is this right or wrong, is the first, last, and only question he asks.” Pertinently, the
Rail Splitter
’s masthead comprised a likeness of Lincoln’s “homely but honest face” above the legend “An Honest Man’s the Noblest Work of God.” Democrats’ efforts to counter these Republican thrusts invoked the testimony of Charles Hanks that his cousin was an ambitious, unprincipled party-switcher who, having been a Democrat when he first arrived in Illinois, had jumped ship because he lived in a Whig district, and subsequently joined the Republicans through the lure of office. Douglas’s paper in Springfield lamented the “vulgarity” and “impurity” of Lincoln’s jokes (“His qualifications for side-splitting are quite as good as for rail-splitting . . . but neither vocation is supposed to be carried out extensively in the white house”) and dryly added that, politically, it could be assumed that “Mr. Lincoln’s honesty is about on a par with the scheming office-hunters generally of his class and party.” But his opponents found it hard seriously to shift the widespread perception of Lincoln as “the very soul of integrity.”
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By these means Republicans became the godly party crusading for righteousness. As in 1856, they flavored their conventions with prayer and encouraged clergy to take a salient role in the political campaign. Although some of the most radical antislavery evangelicals demanded still higher ground, many influential religious editors and prominent ministers, such as Henry Ward Beecher and Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, became active supporters. In contrast to 1856, however, when Frémont’s alleged Catholicism proved a damaging diversion, the party now had a presidential candidate well fitted for each of the critical issues: slavery, Catholicism, and corruption. In consequence, Republicans fought the campaign with supreme ideological confidence. “We stand upon a rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” Caleb Smith told the Chicago delegates. Editors believed their platform embodied “the
moral instincts and feelings of the nineteenth century.
” “Democratic Jacobins” were in a battle against “civilization and Christianity,” the “moral sentiment of the nation,” “the pulpit, the church, the academy.” Schurz could recall no other campaign “in which the best impulses of human nature were so forceful and effective and aroused the masses to so high a pitch of almost religious fervor.” When Republicans gathered for the great Springfield meeting in August, it seemed to one observer that their hearts were filled with the prayer: “May God speed the right.”
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A few Democrats responded in kind by pointing to ministerial celebrities who had endorsed their own party: Jedediah Burchard, the Presbyterian revivalist; the Methodist Henry Clay Dean, who was on the Democrats’ slate of presidential electors in Iowa; and Peter Cartwright.
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But in general, Democrats and Constitutional Unionists jeered at the Republicans for claiming to be “the
decency,
moral
and
Christian
party.
” Thus, when Springfield’s joyful Lincoln men pealed church bells on news of his nomination in May, the town’s Douglasite paper protested: “Black republicanism has ever recognized pulpits and church bells as party adjuncts, but yesterday’s performance run the thing a little beyond the line of decency.” In nearby Pana, Douglasites told of Republicans marking the Chicago convention by singing “Old Hundred” and “Pisgah,” and calling for prayer—in the shade of “the sainted [John] Brown.” Democrats derided Republicans as “a religious Sect” with a “holy zeal for its one idea,” the natural allies of “blue light puritans” and “fanatical Sabbatarians,” who were working to unite church and state, and universalize New England morality: if the party “had not slavery for a hobby, it would be vexing us about some other questions of morals or of social arrangement.” This was the party of “ultra and fanatical” ministers who aimed to turn Lincoln into one of God’s “instrumentalities” in the great battle against slavery; of Owen Lovejoy, “the old nigger stealer,” “great negroite,” and abolitionist, whose “sacred drippings” (stump speeches) aimed to secure the election of his like-minded friend. Responding with ridicule to what it considered Republican sanctimony, the
Campaign
Plain
Dealer
of Cleveland, Ohio, proffered “A Political Sermon. By the Rev. Hardshell Pike,” a satirical riposte to the jeremiads of Lincolnite ministers. Taking as his “tex” the reading “
He
split
some
rails
in
Illinoy
and
bossed
a
roarin’
flat-boat,
” the Douglasite preacher developed his theme: