Lincoln (49 page)

Lincoln could not openly campaign for the nomination because tradition dictated that the office should seek the man, and he necessarily worked through aides and intermediaries, many of them veterans from his 1858 senatorial race. In Springfield he continued to rely on Hatch, the Illinois secretary of state, and Dubois, the state auditor, whose offices made them
privy to detailed, confidential political information about every part of the state. In the Chicago area Wentworth offered to be Lincoln’s Warwick, but he turned instead to Judd. He did not entirely trust Judd but recognized his power as chairman of the Illinois Republican state central committee and as the Illinois member of the Republican National Committee. Both Leonard Swett and Richard Yates, who were competing with Judd for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, served as Lincoln’s agents in central Illinois. Gustave Koerner, the Belleville lawyer, was his principal connection to the German-American constituency, which he also tried to reach through Dr. Theodore Canisius, whose newspaper, the Springfield
Illinois Staats-Anzeiger,
he secretly owned. His most trusted adviser, however, was Judge David Davis, who emerged as his informal campaign manager. “I keep no secrets from him,” Lincoln declared.

These Lincoln managers were not an organized or unified group. Throughout Lincoln’s career, his advisers felt connected only to him, not to each other or to some larger cause. Indeed, their loyalty to Lincoln was matched, in many cases, by the distrust they exhibited toward each other. Davis never forgave Judd’s role in defeating Lincoln’s election to the Senate in 1855; Judd hated Wentworth; Wentworth attacked not merely Judd but Hatch and Dubois; Swett and Yates were rivals united only by their dislike of Judd. Of course, Lincoln was aware of this dissonance, but he tolerated it; perhaps he believed that advisers in competition with each other would work all the harder.

One result of this decentralized command structure was that each member of the group came to think that he, and he alone, truly understood Lincoln and gave him useful advice. Curiously enough, many of Lincoln’s advisers viewed him as a man who needed to be encouraged and protected. Even those who played only minor roles in the Republican party often shared this attitude. For instance, Nathan M. Knapp, chairman of the Scott County, Illinois, Republican party, believed that Lincoln was a greater man than he himself realized: “He has not known his own power—uneducated in Youth, he has always been doubtful whether he was not pushing himself into positions to which he was unequal.” David Davis put it another way: “Lincoln has few of the qualities of a politician and... cannot do much personally to advance his interests,” because he was such “a guileless man.” Had Lincoln known of this pronouncement, he might have been amused.

While his managers were hard at work, Lincoln had to appear above the fray. To requests for his views on the political scene, he replied that he was not the fittest person to answer such questions because “when not a very great man begins to be mentioned for a very great position, his head is very likely to be a little turned.” Nevertheless, he managed to offer opinions that, without being barbed or invidious, cast doubts on the availability of the other prominently mentioned candidates. Seward, he declared, “is the very best candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very
worst
for the South of it.” The same held for Chase, “except that he is a newer
man.” Bates “would be the best man for the South of our State, and the worst for the North of it.” The strongest candidate, he asserted with apparent lack of guile, was Justice John McLean, aged seventy-five—if only he were fifteen, or even ten, years younger.

Even with avowed supporters Lincoln was cagey. When James F. Babcock, editor of the
New Haven Palladium,
who had been much impressed by the speeches Lincoln made in the recent Connecticut campaign, offered to promote his candidacy, he replied, in unusually opaque language: “As to the Presidential nomination, claiming no greater exemption from selfishness than is common, I still feel that my whole aspiration should be, and therefore must be, to be placed anywhere, or nowhere, as may appear most likely to advance our cause.” Nevertheless, he passed along to Babcock a list of eleven “confidential friends” who were working for his nomination.

When one enterprising Illinois Republican suggested that he ought to have a campaign chest of $10,000, Lincoln replied that the proposal was an impossibility: “I could not raise ten thousand dollars if it would save me from the fate of John Brown. Nor have my friends, so far as I know, yet reached the point of staking any money on my chances of success.” To a request for money from Mark W. Delahay, an old and somewhat disreputable Illinois friend who hoped to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in order to promote his chance of being elected senator from Kansas, Lincoln responded, “I can not enter the ring on the money basis—first, because, in the main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money.” Yet, admitting that “in a political contest, the use of some [money], is both right, and indispensable,” he offered to furnish Delahay $100 for his expenses in attending the convention. (As it turned out, Delahay was not chosen as a Kansas delegate but went to Chicago anyhow to root for Lincoln, who paid him the money he had promised.)

Central to Lincoln’s planning was Douglas’s expected role in the coming campaign. If the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to meet in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, nominated the Little Giant, the Republicans would be obliged to choose a candidate from the West, where Douglas was enormously popular. On the other hand, if the Democrats nominated a Southern-rights champion, like Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, or if the party split, Republicans would feel free to nominate Seward, Chase, or any other antislavery leader. Thus, as had so often been the case, Lincoln’s prospects varied directly with Douglas’s.

Given this political reality, Lincoln adopted a very simple campaign strategy. He hoped to go into the Republican National Convention with the unanimous support of the Illinois delegation and perhaps with the backing of a few individuals in other delegations. If Seward failed to secure the nomination on the first ballot—a decision that would be determined in no small part by what happened to Douglas—Lincoln and other candidates would have their chance on a second ballot. Recognizing that most members of the convention would favor someone else, Lincoln thought that his great
strength lay in the fact that no one made “any positive objection” to him. “My name is new in the field; and I suppose I am not the
first
choice of a very great many,” he explained to Samuel Galloway. “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.”

The first step was to secure the unanimous support of the Illinois delegation. This was not an easy task, because both the Sewardites in northern Illinois and the Bates men in the south favored selecting delegates by districts, thus, as Judd said, “hoping to steal in a few men.” Alerted that the votes of Yates and the other members of the central committee from central Illinois would determine this question, Lincoln promised: “I shall attend to it as well as I know how, which, G———d knows, will not be very well.” In fact, he attended to it well enough, for the central committee voted for the statewide election of delegates.

It was equally important to have the Republican National Convention meet in Chicago, where the newspapers, the crowds, and the publicity would be heavily tilted in Lincoln’s favor. The rival site was St. Louis, where the Bates influence would be strong. When Judd, as a member of the Republican National Committee, seemed slow to grasp the importance of this choice, Lincoln wrote him that “some of our friends here” thought the location of the convention of great consequence. With this prodding, Judd carried the case for Chicago to the meeting of the national committee, which chose the Windy City by a margin of one vote—his own.

Even more important was the action of the Illinois Republican state convention, which met at Decatur on May 9–10, a week before the national convention. To house the gathering the citizens of the town had followed a practice adopted by Republicans throughout the West and constructed what they called a Wigwam, a barnlike wooden structure capable of holding the hundreds of delegates and spectators. For many who attended, the principal business of this convention was the choice of a candidate for governor; eventually the supporters of Swett and Yates combined to defeat Judd and to give the nomination to Yates. As to presidential candidates, Illinois Republicans were divided, but it was generally recognized that the convention would give a complimentary endorsement of Lincoln as a favorite son. Even David Davis thought it was a foregone conclusion that the national convention would choose either Bates or Seward; a first-ballot vote for Lincoln would simply be a compliment.

But a few of Lincoln’s warmest supporters were determined to make the Decatur convention a launching pad for a serious presidential campaign. They felt that what had been lacking so far was a catchy slogan, like “Log Cabin and Hard Cider,” which had done so much to elect President Harrison in 1840. Of course, Lincoln was already widely known as “Old Abe” or “Honest Abe,” but these sobriquets seemed so colorless as to be almost negative. Richard J. Oglesby, a vigorous young Decatur politician, felt Lincoln needed a more dynamic image. Consulting with the elderly John Hanks, a
first cousin of Lincoln’s mother, he located a rail fence that Hanks and Lincoln had put up in 1830 and carried two of the rails home with him. On the first day of the convention, during an interruption in the voting for governor, Oglesby introduced Hanks, who, with an assistant, marched down the aisle carrying into the Wigwam the two rails labeled:

The label was not entirely accurate, for Lincoln’s father had not been the first pioneer in the county and it was John, rather than Thomas, Hanks who had helped split the rails, but nobody cared. As the rails, decorated with flags and streamers, were carried to the front of the Wigwam, the crowd burst into deafening applause. Lincoln, called to the stand, blushed and told the delegates that he had indeed built a cabin and split rails thirty years ago near Decatur. Whether these particular rails were taken from that fence, he could not vouch, but, he said in his disarming way, “he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.”

The cheers that greeted Lincoln’s remarks suggested that even his managers had underestimated his popularity. Now labeled “the Rail Splitter”—just as Andrew Jackson had been “Old Hickory” and Harrison “Tippecanoe”—he acquired an image with enormous popular appeal: he could be packaged not merely as a powerful advocate of the free-soil ideology or as a folksy, unpretentious, storytelling campaigner, but also as the embodiment of the self-made man, the representative of free labor, and the spokesman of the great West. It mattered very little that this myth—like most myths—was only partially true: Lincoln, in fact, had little love for his pioneer origins; he disliked physical labor and left it as soon as he could; he owed his early advancement as much to the efforts of interested friends like John Todd Stuart, Stephen T. Logan, and David Davis as to his own exertions. Rather than a simple backwoodsman, he was a prominent and successful attorney representing the most powerful interests in emerging corporate America. The delegates at Decatur understood that myth was more important than reality. They cheered now not just for a favorite son but for a viable Illinois presidential candidate.

After the convention adjourned for the day, Lincoln met with Judd, Davis, and a few other friends in a grove near the Wigwam, where, lying on the grass, they carefully studied the list of delegates to be sent to Chicago. Lincoln personally selected the four at-large delegates. Judd, as a member of the Republican National Committee and as a representative of Chicago interests, was one, of course. Recognizing the importance of the German vote, Lincoln named Koerner for the second slot. For the third he picked
Browning, who had great influence among conservative old-line Whigs and, especially, among the former Know Nothings. Knowing that Browning preferred Bates, Lincoln relied on his old friend’s personal loyalty and his devotion to Illinois interests. The final member of the team was David Davis.

Lincoln and his friends had no control over the selection of the eighteen other delegates who represented the individual congressional districts, but they suspected that about eight of them were Seward supporters. To prevent them from defecting, Lincoln’s advisers agreed to ram through the convention the next day a resolution that John M. Palmer would introduce: “That Abraham Lincoln is the choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and the delegates from this State are instructed to use all honorable means to secure his nomination by the Chicago Convention, and to vote as a unit for him.” At Chicago, Illinois would be unanimous for Lincoln.

Lincoln was tempted to attend the Chicago convention. After he returned from Decatur, he told Leonard Swett that “he was almost too much of a candidate to go, and not quite enough to stay at home.” On reflection, he decided to remain in Springfield while the delegates began to assemble. He cordially greeted the occasional member who passed through Springfield, assuring several of them that he was a candidate only for the presidency and did not wish to be considered for the second place on the Republican ticket. Recognizing that Seward would have the votes of the more extreme antislavery men, Lincoln sought to ensure that he would be presented in Chicago as a moderate candidate. To Edward L. Baker, editor of the
Illinois State Journal,
who was going to the convention, he entrusted a brief note: “I agree with Seward in his ‘Irrepressible Conflict,’ but I do not endorse his ‘Higher Law’ doctrine.” The former he viewed as little more than a restatement of his own house-divided thesis, while he recognized that Seward’s invocation of a law higher than the Constitution frightened moderate and conservative Republicans.