The Fiery Trial (14 page)

Lincoln calculated that the new legislature consisted of fifty-seven anti-Nebraska members and forty-three Democrats. But the new majority comprised what one member called “discordant elements”—men elected as Republicans, Whigs, fusionists, anti-Nebraska Democrats, temperance advocates, and nativists. Lincoln began writing to legislators and to local political leaders throughout Illinois seeking their support for his Senate candidacy. Sometimes he described himself as a Whig; sometimes he avoided identifying a party affiliation. Those who considered themselves Whigs expressed support for Lincoln. But anti-Nebraska Democrats preferred one of their own.
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Many abolitionists and Free Soilers from northern Illinois considered Lincoln insufficiently antislavery. In the
Free West
, Zebina Eastman advised antislavery members of the legislature not to vote for Lincoln “or any of the moderate men of his stamp.” Lincoln, Eastman claimed, not only remained loyal to “that mummy of a Whig party,” but also “dares not oppose the Fugitive Slave Law.” Lincoln’s Kentucky birth and family connections worried some antislavery advocates. “I must confess I am afraid of ‘Abe,’” the Chicago editor Charles H. Ray wrote to Elihu B. Washburne, who had just won reelection to Congress. “He is southern by birth, southern in his associations, and southern, if I mistake not, in his sympathies. I have thought that he would not come squarely up to the mark in a hand to hand fight with southern influence and dictation. His wife, you, know, is a Todd, of a pro-slavery family, and so are all his kin.”

At Lincoln’s request, Washburne launched a campaign to swing northern Illinois radicals to Lincoln’s candidacy. He approached Ohio congressman Joshua R. Giddings, who had admired Lincoln since they lived together and cooperated in seeking to end slavery in the nation’s capital in 1849. Giddings, Washburne reported to Lincoln, “is your strongest possible friend and says he would walk clear to Illinois to elect you.” Giddings promised to write on Lincoln’s behalf to the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, one of the newly elected members of the legislature. Washburne assured Eastman that Lincoln was “a man of splendid talents, of great probity of character, and…threw himself into the late fight on the
republican platform
and made the greatest speech in reply to Douglas ever heard in the state.” “
I know he is with us in sentiment
,” Washburne added.
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Washburne and Giddings succeeded in convincing the “extreme Anti-Slavery men,” as Lincoln called them, including Lovejoy. When voting began, they all supported Lincoln, who received forty-four votes on the first ballot. Senator Shields tallied forty-one; five anti-Nebraska Democrats, unwilling to back a Whig, supported Lyman Trumbull; and eight legislators scattered their votes among other candidates. As balloting continued, Lincoln found it impossible to gain the votes of Trumbull’s supporters, and without them he could not reach the required majority. Suddenly, Democrats abandoned Shields and appeared within reach of electing Governor Joel Matteson, a Democrat not associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “Taken by surprise,” as he put it, and unwilling to see the possibility of electing an antislavery senator disappear, Lincoln ordered his backers to cast their votes for Trumbull, ensuring his victory on the next ballot.
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If this episode demonstrated anything, it was that prior political affiliations constituted a major obstacle to antislavery cooperation. The outcome left Lincoln bitterly disappointed. But his willingness to sacrifice personal ambition for political principle reinforced his standing among those opposed to the expansion of slavery. Once a statewide Republican party emerged in 1856, he became its presumptive candidate for the Senate in 1858, when Douglas’s term would expire. Meanwhile, Lyman Trumbull’s election deepened the split in the Democratic party and earned him the bitter enmity of Douglas and his supporters, who viewed him as “the quintessence of political and moral turpitude.” For their part, despite having backed Lincoln, the political abolitionists viewed the result as a triumph for their cause. At this point, because of his long record of defending the legal rights of the black community in Illinois, Trumbull had more of an antislavery reputation than Lincoln.
²⁴

Throughout 1855 and early 1856, the political situation in Illinois and throughout the North remained unsettled. “Bleeding Kansas”—violence between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the territory—kept the slavery issue on the front pages. But the successes of the Know-Nothings in state elections in 1855 suggested that they had as much chance of replacing the Whigs as the chief rival to the Democrats as a new antislavery coalition. Efforts to expand the fledgling Illinois Republican party made little headway. In August 1855, northern Illinois abolitionists, led by Owen Lovejoy, reached out to Lincoln, Trumbull, and other antislavery politicians, urging them to join the party they had created. Lovejoy promised that it would adopt a moderate platform, in recognition of the necessity of “not loading the middle and southern portions of the state with too heavy a load.”

Neither Lincoln nor Trumbull responded favorably. “Not even you,” Lincoln replied, “are more anxious to prevent the extension of slavery than I; and yet the political atmosphere is such, just now, that I fear to do any thing, lest I do wrong.” The main problem, he continued, was that the Know-Nothing party had not yet “tumbled to pieces.” Lincoln found the party’s views reprehensible but did not wish to attack it openly. In central Illinois, where the party attracted many Old Line Whigs who saw it as a way of suppressing the dangerous slavery question, the Know-Nothings, Lincoln wrote, consisted mostly of his “old political and personal friends” whose participation would be essential to any successful antislavery coalition. A few days later, Trumbull also rejected Lovejoy’s plea. He identified as the main obstacles to “fusion” the persistence of “old party associations, and side issues, such as Know-Nothingism and the Temperance question.” Trumbull, along with other prominent Illinois Democrats who had broken with Douglas, remained reluctant to join a new organization in which, they feared, they would occupy a position “at the tail end of the old Whig party.”
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Also in August 1855, Lincoln penned his often-quoted letter to Joshua Speed about the political situation:

Clearly, Lincoln despised the nativists. As early as 1844, he had helped to organize a public meeting in Springfield that denied that the Whig party harbored “hostility…to foreigners and Catholics.” Ten years later, during his campaign for a seat in the legislature, he turned down the endorsement of the Sangamon County Know-Nothings. (Characteristically, he told a story to the party delegation that came to see him. He had asked his immigrant Irish gardener Patrick, Lincoln recounted, why he had not been born in the United States. “Faith, Mr. Lincoln,” Patrick replied, “I wanted to be, but my mother wouldn’t let me.”) Nonetheless, Lincoln said, the Know-Nothings were welcome to vote for him if they wished. He only expressed his strong antinativist views in private, knowing that no antislavery coalition could succeed without Know-Nothing support.
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As late as November 1855, the
Illinois State Journal
insisted that “this Republican movement” could never “prove the basis of a permanent party” in the state. But soon afterward, Lincoln decided that the time had come to “fuse.” In January 1856, leading antislavery Whigs and Democrats, almost certainly including Lincoln, agreed to form a new party devoted to preventing the westward expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, Paul Selby, who ran a newspaper in Jacksonville, Illinois, had called for the state’s antislavery editors to gather in Decatur on February 22, 1856, to plan a strategy for the upcoming state and national elections.

Because of a snowstorm, only a dozen newspapermen made it to Decatur. Lincoln was the only nonjournalist present, and he helped to draft resolutions that deftly covered both moderate and radical antislavery ground. The resulting platform disclaimed any intention to interfere with slavery in the southern states, affirmed the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise rather than barring slavery from all territories. These were moderate positions. But the resolutions also adopted the “freedom national” doctrine of more radical Republicans, holding that in any place under national jurisdiction, freedom was “the rule” and slavery “the exception.” In a nod to the Know-Nothings, the resolutions denounced “attacks” on the public school system (supposedly emanating from Catholics), while to appeal to immigrant voters it opposed any changes in the naturalization laws and defended the principle of religious freedom—positions advocated by a German-American editor and supported by Lincoln. “We have no doubt,” proclaimed the
Chicago Tribune
, “that the platform laid down will be satisfactory to the Anti Nebraska men of all sections of the state, no matter what their political antecedents or present political affiliations.” The editors called a convention to meet at Bloomington in May to nominate candidates for state office.
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Lincoln threw himself into the fusion movement, even as most of his local political associates held back. Three years later, a resident of Springfield would recall in a newspaper letter how Lincoln “started out in this city, almost solitary and alone, as a defender of the Republican party and the Republican faith.” As the Bloomington convention approached, Lincoln worked behind the scenes to make sure that antislavery Know-Nothings, Democrats, and Whigs attended, and that none of them were put off by the presence of abolitionists like Ichabod Codding and Owen Lovejoy. Trumbull, too, urged his political allies to participate. Republicans, he assured reluctant anti-Nebraska Democrats, would take their stand on the principle of opposition to the expansion of slavery and “will I think be willing to abandon their ultraisms” for this “one issue.”
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As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats. The platform, written by Lincoln’s old Whig legislative colleague Orville H. Browning with the assistance of Lincoln and Trumbull, called for preventing the extension of slavery “into territories heretofore free,” a less radical demand than barring the institution from all territories, and a far cry from Republican platforms in more radical states that called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and the complete divorce of the federal government from slavery. In the name of party unity, Lincoln pressed for the nomination of William H. Bissell, an anti-Nebraska Democrat from southern Illinois, for governor. To appeal to German-American voters, the convention nominated one of their leaders, Francis Hoffmann, for lieutenant governor, but the rest of the ticket consisted of former Know-Nothings. Nonetheless, the platform opposed all discrimination “on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth.”

Lincoln delivered the convention’s major speech. He electrified the audience with, in the words of one reporter, “the power of his argument, the intense irony of his invective, and the deep earnestness and fervid brilliancy of his eloquence.” So “spell bound” were his listeners that journalists ceased taking notes—hence Lincoln’s remarks have been known ever since as his “lost speech.” Whatever Lincoln said, Zebina Eastman later claimed that after the convention “there was no longer any opposition to Mr. Lincoln from the most radical of the abolitionists.”
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To be sure, the abolitionists and Free Soilers who had tried to create a Republican party in 1854 had little influence in the newly reconstituted organization. But Lovejoy did address the Bloomington convention, and Lincoln made clear that he and his supporters must be a part of the broad antislavery coalition. Meanwhile, Ichabod Codding shrewdly predicted that disappointing as the platform seemed, “the Republicans will be driven to take the whole Anti-Slavery issue before they are through with this controversy.”
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The Bloomington convention appointed delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention, which met in June 1856 in Philadelphia. There, the atmosphere proved distinctly more radical than in Illinois. The temporary president, Robert Emmet of New York, opened the proceedings by proclaiming, to “long continued cheering,” that any “honest man…who respects the immortal Declaration of Independence” hoped to see the day when slavery “shall not exist in the world.” The resolutions called on Congress to admit Kansas as a free state and to prohibit in the territories the “twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery” (an appeal to anti-Mormon sentiment). It insisted that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had the power to “give legal existence to slavery” in any territory. In a mild slap at the Know-Nothings, the platform reaffirmed the right of all Americans to “liberty of conscience” and opposed legislation impairing the “security” of any group.