Lincoln (36 page)

At Peoria, Lincoln gave essentially the same speech that he had delivered in Springfield; this time he wrote it out for publication in full over a week’s issues of the
Illinois State Journal,
so that it would be widely read throughout the state. He went on from Peoria to Urbana, where he delivered his speech so effectively that years later Henry C. Whitney declared it had never been equaled before or since. After Lincoln spoke in Chicago, a journalist reported that he created the impression “on all men, of all parties,... first, that he was an honest man, and second, that he was a powerful speaker.”

In the fall elections voters across the North repudiated Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one New York congressmen elected were anti-Nebraska men, and so were twenty-one out of the twenty-five Pennsylvania representatives. Every congressman in Ohio was an opponent of Kansas-Nebraska, as were all but two in Indiana. Illinois joined the movement. Though the anti-Nebraska coalition failed to reelect Yates to Congress, choosing instead Douglas’s loyal lieutenant, Thomas L. Harris, the Democrats could boast of few other victories. Anti-Nebraska candidates won five of the state’s nine seats in the House of Representatives, and anti-Nebraska
forces, by a small majority, would control the next General Assembly, whose principal duty would be to elect the next United States senator from Illinois.

Even before the makeup of the new legislature was clear, Lincoln began to campaign for that office. He had been thinking about the prospect for some time. His address at Chicago, for instance, was probably intended to consolidate his following in the northern part of the state. Once the election turned out so favorably for the anti-Nebraska coalition, he sprang into action. Three days after the election he wrote candidly to Charles Hoyt, a client whom he had represented in an important patent suit: “You used to express a good deal of partiality for me; and if you are still so, now is the time. Some friends here are really for me, for the U.S. Senate.” He asked Hoyt and his other correspondents to “make a mark for me” with members of the new legislature and solicited “the names, post-offices, and
political position”
of the incoming senators and representatives. His appeal went mainly to members of the Whig party. “It has come round that a whig may, by possibility, be elected to the U. S. Senate,” he wrote one new legislator; “and I want the chance of being the man. You are a member of the Legislature, and have a vote to give. Think it over, and see whether you can do better than to go for me.” So assiduous was he in soliciting votes that, as Herndon wrote, during the weeks after the November election “he slept, like Napoleon, with one eye open.”

Lincoln recognized that his candidacy was problematical. The new legislature was certain to be fragmented and disorganized; only four of the seventy-five representatives in the previous legislature retained their seats. The anti-Nebraska majority was slim and far from united on any one man. There were, he discovered, “ten or a dozen, on our side, who are willing to be known as candidates,” plus “fifty secretly watching for a chance.” The Democrats could be counted on to offer “a terrible struggle,” and many vowed that, rather than elect an anti-Nebraska senator, they would prevent the state senate, where they were in the majority, from joining the house of representatives in a joint session and thus stave off any choice.

Lincoln understood, too, that there were particular problems blocking his own candidacy. For one thing, in November, Sangamon County voters had elected him again to the state legislature, with the largest number of votes given to any candidate. This was, at best, bittersweet news, because the Illinois constitutional provision prohibiting the legislature from electing one of its own members to higher office might give unenthusiastic legislators an excuse not to vote for him. Apart from that, the new legislature was going to be so closely divided that, if Lincoln accepted the office, he might have the deciding vote in the election of senator. Propriety dictated that a man should not vote for himself but must abstain or cast his ballot for his opponent. There was, then, a real possibility that if Lincoln served in the legislature he might be obliged to assist in the reelection of the Democratic candidate,
James Shields, his old political foe and Douglas’s right-hand man. He thought about the problem for two weeks and then declined to accept election to the House of Representatives. “I only allowed myself to be elected,” he explained, “because it was supposed my doing so would help Yates.”

According to Charles H. Ray, of the
Chicago Tribune,
Lincoln’s declination “did more than any thing else to damage him with the Abolitionists” throughout the state, for they thought he was putting his personal fortunes above those of the anti-Nebraska movement. The Know Nothings, who had supported Lincoln, were also resentful at what they considered betrayal; Dr. William Jayne reported that they were “down on Lincoln—hated him.” Taken by surprise by Lincoln’s refusal to serve, the anti-Nebraska forces in Sangamon County were unable to field a strong candidate in the special election held just before Christmas, and a Democrat won the Sangamon seat in the legislature. Opponents chuckled that the voters had slapped Lincoln’s face, and Shields called the outcome “the best Christmas joke of the season.”

Lincoln had also to steer his way out of his entanglement with the radical antislavery wing of the anti-Nebraska movement, which constituted the new Republican party. Whether from prudence or pressure of business, he had been absent from Springfield in October 1854, when their convention adopted a platform urging an end to slavery in all national territories and a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and made him a member of the state central committee. Lincoln neither accepted nor declined membership and, indeed, made no response until after the election, when Codding requested him to attend a meeting of the committee. As delicately as possible, he tried to disengage himself from a group whose votes he wanted but with whom he could not afford to be publicly affiliated. “I have been perplexed some to understand why my name was placed on that committee,” he wrote Codding. “I was not consulted on the subject; nor was I apprized of the appointment, until I discovered it by accident two or three weeks afterwards.” He could easily have resigned, but he was not willing to repudiate voters whose support he needed for the senate election. “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party,” he continued; “but I had also supposed that the
extent
to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically; was not at all satisfactory to that party.” Did the Republicans misunderstand his position, he asked diplomatically, or did he misunderstand theirs?

Once again, Lincoln was making it clear that he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a Whig, not as a Republican, much less as an abolitionist. Despite the soaring eloquence of his Springfield speech, his message was a moderate one, which appealed to the conservatism of Whigs in central Illinois. Unlike the antislavery radicals, he did not favor prohibiting the admission of additional slave states to the Union; indeed, he stated explicitly
that, much as he hated slavery, he “would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved.” Unlike Republicans, he did not call for the elimination of slavery in all national territories; he stood pledged to the Compromise of 1850, which allowed New Mexico and Utah to tolerate or to forbid slavery. He accepted the Fugitive Slave Act, though he suggested it should be modified so that it would “not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.” Rather than condemning Southerners for the immorality of slaveholding, he expressed sympathy for the South, where he and so many other Whigs in central Illinois had been born.

In thus distancing himself from the Republican wing of the anti-Nebraska coalition, Lincoln knew that he risked alienating the earnest antislavery element. In the northern part of the state many felt that no man closely identified with either of the old parties ought to be elected senator. From repeated betrayals they distrusted the professions of all “mere politicians.” Many were suspicious of Lincoln because of his background. “I must confess I am afraid of ‘Abe,’” Ray wrote. “He is Southern by birth, Southern in his associations and southern, if I mistake not, in his sympathies.... His wife, you know, is a Todd, of a pro-slavery family, and so are all his kin.”

Through intermediaries Lincoln worked to assuage these doubts. The previous summer Herndon had tried to reach Zebina Eastman, the fiercely abolitionist editor of the Chicago
Free West.
Known to be more radical on the slavery issue than his partner, Herndon had a long talk with the editor about Lincoln and offered him “a sight of his heart.” “Although he does not say much,” he pledged, “you may depend upon it; Mr. Lincoln is all right.” Eastman was impressed, but not convinced, and the
Free West
continued to lament Lincoln’s shortcomings. For more effective assistance, Lincoln turned to Elihu B. Washburne, who had just been elected to Congress from the Galena district as a Republican but who as a former Whig had great admiration for Lincoln. Washburne earnestly recommended Lincoln to Eastman and the northern Illinois Republicans as “a man of splendid talents, of great probity of character,” who at Springfield had “made the greatest speech in reply to Douglas ever heard in the State.” Most influential of all with Illinois abolitionists was the veteran Ohio antislavery leader Joshua R. Giddings, who announced unconditional support for his old congressional messmate and declared that he “would walk clear to Illinois” to help elect Lincoln.

It was harder to know how to deal with the Know Nothings in the incoming legislature—in part because nobody was sure just who belonged to the secret order. Leonard Swett, who was rounding up support for Lincoln in northern Illinois, passed along the prediction of a local newspaper editor, himself a member of one of the lodges, that the Know Nothings would control the new General Assembly. There was a general belief that they favored Lincoln. The
Free West
announced bluntly, “Mr. Lincoln is a Know Nothing and expects the full vote... of the Know Nothings.” That was not
true, but even the rumor of nativism lost him support. Publicly to repudiate the Know Nothings would be even more costly. Lincoln held his peace and did nothing to alienate voters who belonged to the secret organization.

Many of the responses to Lincoln’s letter-writing campaign were all that he could have hoped for. “It will give me pleasure to do what I can for your appointment to the Sennet,” Charles Hoyt wrote him. “So far as any effort of mine, can aid in securing such a result,” replied editor Robert Boal of Lacon, “it will not be spared, and in any way in which I can assist you, my services are at your disposal.” A correspondent in Lewistown wrote that the most prominent Whigs of his vicinity were earnestly for Lincoln on the somewhat equivocal ground that “we want some one that can stand right up to the little Giant
(excuse me)
it takes a great Blackguard (you know) to do that—
and thou art
(excuse again)
the Man.”

But other responses were less encouraging. After talking with a new member of the legislature, Abraham Jonas, Lincoln’s firm friend in Quincy, had to report, “I can get nothing out of him, except that he will act altogether with the Whig party in regard to Senator and will make no pledges.” A representative from Coles County was said to think well of Lincoln, “tho he seems to make it a matter of pride not to commit himself.” And Thomas J. Turner of Freeport, who was to become the speaker of the new House of Representatives, loftily replied: “I am not committed to any one for the office of U. S. Senator, nor do I intend to be untill I know where I can exert my influence the most successfully against those who are seeking to extend the era of Slavery.”

Even so, when the legislature assembled on January 1, 1855, Lincoln believed that he had 26 members committed to his election—more than twice as many as pledged to any other candidate. He needed 25 more votes. By his estimate, 43 of the 100 members of the General Assembly were Douglas Democrats, none of whom would vote for Lincoln. Douglas had made the senatorial election a referendum on popular sovereignty, and he insisted that all true Democrats in the legislature must endorse the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They should also support Shields, who had been Douglas’s loyal ally in the Senate. “Our friends in the Legislature should nominate Shields by acclamation, and nail his flag to the mast,” the senator directed, “and never haul it down under any circumstances nor for any body.” Even if that course resulted in a stalemate, with no candidate receiving a majority of the votes, that would be preferable to “the election of Lincoln or any other man spoken of.” If Shields was defeated, the Democrats could “throw the responsibility on the Whigs of beating him
because he was born in Ireland.”
“The Nebraska fight is over,” Douglas counseled, “and Know Nothingism has taken its place as the chief issue in the future.”

In order to win, therefore, Lincoln had to have the backing of nearly every anti-Nebraska legislator. Throughout January, as the rival elements in the anti-Nebraska coalition jockeyed for position, he constantly lobbied for election. He tried not to be too obvious in his efforts, but again and again,
as he chatted with legislators, the senate election would come up and he would say, “That is a rather delicate subject for me to talk upon, but I must confess that I would be glad of your support for the office, if you shall conclude that I am the proper person for it.” To assist his supporters in the legislature he prepared several small notebooks in which he carefully listed the members of the state senate and house of representatives, the counties they represented, and their political affiliations. David Davis temporarily threw aside his judicial robes to help plan Lincoln’s legislative strategy. Logan, who had just been elected to the house of representatives, became his floor manager, entrusted with making necessary deals to secure the support of the northern antislavery members. Herndon did all he could to influence the abolitionist element, while Leonard Swett and Ward Hill Lamon buttonholed uncommitted legislators.